I don’t have a take on the empirical evidence here, but maybe things like this could be caused by “negative inoculation prompting”.
In inoculation prompting, you tell the model during training that it’s ok to do bad thing X, in the hopes that if you accidentally reward X then the model learns “do X when told it’s ok” rather than “do X”.
Depending on how constitutional training is done, we could be teaching the model some version of “don’t do X when told not to by the constitution” or “don’t do X because the constitution says not to” rather than teaching it not to want to do X.
I don’t have a take on the empirical evidence here, but maybe things like this could be caused by “negative inoculation prompting”.
In inoculation prompting, you tell the model during training that it’s ok to do bad thing X, in the hopes that if you accidentally reward X then the model learns “do X when told it’s ok” rather than “do X”.
Depending on how constitutional training is done, we could be teaching the model some version of “don’t do X when told not to by the constitution” or “don’t do X because the constitution says not to” rather than teaching it not to want to do X.