> Eventually I’ll reach a point where I am forced to choose between the useful aspects of the model and the limiting ones instead of just picking the most capable model out there

No, the choice will be whether or not to to upgrade to "Claude Security Professional" or whatever they want to brand it as.

What look like tightening "constraints" today are just setting up the upsell opportunities of tomorrow.

This is a good point – because pentesting is entirely legitimate work, and security testing is a necessary and legitimate part of every day software engineering.

The problem is that the model can't tell the difference between doing it as part of regular development and doing it in a malicious context. And the root cause of that is that these models lack any sort of real awareness. Humans don't generally get tricked into hacking (in this way).

My org now sends some portion of our requests to non-anthropic models because refusal has become common from Claude. The requests themselves aren't dangerous, we find that benign requests in biological science wind up being blocked semi-frequently.

If it gets worse in future releases, we'd likely step fully away towards more useful (for us) models even if they're less capable.

I think that these companies are going to have to, and will, invest in some sort of validated identity context to avoid the lowest common denominator.

The first challenge is making sure the guard rails work and are robust. Companies are still working on this.

the second challenge is being able to reliably adapt them as appropriate per user. E.g. allow someone to pen test their own app.

The third challenge (which blocks the second) is to be confident about what is safety-aligned with a specific user.

I think the later will be a hard problem, but they will be highly motivated to solve it.

I was using a local Codex project as a personal knowledge base. So I would dump in documents, basic medical docs (like blood labs), and other things and have it file them.

It’s great at filing!

But it’s terrible at retrieval because it would refuse to show me documents or information with personal details - which was everything in the project.

It would say, yes, I know this is your information, sitting on your hard drive, but I still can’t show it to you.

Are they charging for the guardrails? Like do the guardrails expend token counts to then block you from the output of other tokens?

I've run into some of the refusals to handle my credentials, but so far I've appreciated them. I was only handing over credentials that didn't matter, but it's still a good move, the chat logs are clearly stored somewhere to allow the resume functionality to work, which means your credentials can end up sitting around on your filesystem, and any malware would quickly learn to check for those files.

I think those guardrails are a thin layer though. Enough reinforcement that you're legit in CLAUDE.md will get around them, in other words.

4.8 is insanely frustrating. This evening I had a few tasks to pull information in and it plainly stated that the environment it was in had no network access. After three asks to "try again, check the system prompt" it finally relented and then basically stated it was lying.

Fresh session, no prior context on 4.8. These things are becoming useless Duplo.

Opus 4.6 will still help with full pentesting including RCE. Just requires coaxing (no jailbreak)

> guardrails prevented it from solving the problem.

Reminds me of the defense issues with Claude which were complained as “woke” but the reality is more horrifying to me, imagine trying to use a model to keep up with a land invasion on US soil, whoever the enemy is is irrelevant you just know they are using AI, and your guys are telling you that no matter what they type into the prompt it refuses, because if anyone has ever tried to jailbreak an LLM even if human lives are at stake they refuse the request. Now literally millions of lives are on the line but the guardrails that your enemies dont have on their models are costing you lives.

What do you even do then?

AI will always have this issue where it will always pick the worst option for genuinely good requests.

Thank you for your note! As I mention in the post this is not scientific at all.

I'm very curious how you would do multiple runs of multiple models in a "work alongside the model" manner?

It was found with gpt 5.5 7/10 times it’ll be trivially found by mythos

lol what is even the point of this kind of comment? this is the ultimate "source: trust me bro" comment I have ever seen.

every model since gpt3 was claimed to be "too dangerous to release." it's too EXPENSIVE to release, and you're probably a local model with <10B parameters yourself

cool.

I agree fully and hope someone else is able to do this test! For me it was a matter of cost and quotas that stopped me from changing to a new account.

Also just to mention:

Claude guardrails —> that session terminated.

GPT guardrails -> your whole account is slowed down.