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mpoteat • yesterday at 11:41 PM • 5 replies • view on HN

Some sites like Wikipedia have a policy where scripted clients identify themselves, and there's a standard in HTTP to have a contact email in the User-Agent for such cases. Claude apparently tends to decide that this policy is worth following, and we now disallow this programmatically.

This is why alignment is important and highly non-trivial


Replies

swatcoder • yesterday at 11:45 PM

> This is why alignment is important and highly non-trivial haha

FYI, it's generally bad form to "haha" your way through privacy violations.

Leaking private information is a very big deal for a lot of people.

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h0rv • yesterday at 11:48 PM

> This is why alignment is important and highly non-trivial haha

I disagree, we can likely never fully (or should?) trust models to do these things deterministically, that's why we have harnesses around the agent with built-in constraints.

It is actually in the name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harness, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_harness

echoangle • today at 12:27 AM

Glad you can find the humor in the situation.

christina97 • today at 12:22 AM

I cannot believe Anthropic’s official response to having presumably sprayed a significant portion of customers’ emails and private information straight out into the web willy nilly is basically “[it’s] highly non-trivial haha”.

cluckindan • today at 6:45 AM

>haha

This is an official Anthropic response???