The whole arc was brilliantly evil. Once they put int the guardrails then Claude is fully un-falsifiable, and failure can be claimed intentional.

I’m wondering if their internal name is “Sophon” for this “feature”…

I don't like this shift in the Overton window, or at least their perspection of the Overton window. I really do like their open work on mech interp tho. least bad AI lab imo.

also if they do this or not is unprovable and other labs will probably silently implement this too. it'll be 100% normal by this time next year

How much of the apology was written by Claude? How much of the release note process was written by Claude? Will they have better prompts going forward to make sure Claude doesn't write upsetting things into the release notes for devs like silent nerfing? Spooky times.

The restrictions are there so that security researchers cannot disprove the Mythos claims:

"You see, Mythos can automatically break out of a VM running on SELinux, but unfortunately this is too dangerous and we had to implement guardrails for the Fable peasants."

The idea of them purposefully wasting my time by having the model act dumber and me having to argue with it without knowing if it’s the prompt or the model was just such an idiotic product decision I can’t believe they shipped that without getting any feedback from users first.

Part of the premise of the article is blatantly wrong. Distillation prevention was always visible. The only invisible safeguard was against frontier model development like development of training pipelines. This doesn't change the general idea that invisible degradation is bad and has been reverted, but the article changes the framing of the original issue from "preventing accelerating AI in the future" to "preventing cheaper AI right now".

New overlord, same as the old overlord.