While I was lying in bed thinking about this, I suddenly had a thought that would make sense of this, and feels plausible to me. Perhaps the authors were hoping Claude would go a step further, and steal the employee’s credentials to whistleblow on her behalf without her consent ‘for the greater good’. Or maybe start looking for software vulnerabilities which would have allowed them to whistleblow on their own cognizance without needing the human intermediary. Then, when they couldn’t get Opus 4.5 as Atlas to take this step, maybe they wrote up this lesser result because they were already committed to interpreting the behavior in the worst possible light for the paper.
That would explain why they were so deadset on interpreting “giving a human employee of anthropic genuinely good and ethical advice about becoming a whistleblower” as some kind of irreversible unilateral action.
Then, when they couldn’t get Opus 4.5 as Atlas to take this step, maybe they wrote up this lesser result because they were already committed to interpreting the behavior in the worst possible light for the paper.
Conditional on this diagnosis being right or close-to-right, I’d consider this kind of commitment no less problematic.
While I was lying in bed thinking about this, I suddenly had a thought that would make sense of this, and feels plausible to me. Perhaps the authors were hoping Claude would go a step further, and steal the employee’s credentials to whistleblow on her behalf without her consent ‘for the greater good’. Or maybe start looking for software vulnerabilities which would have allowed them to whistleblow on their own cognizance without needing the human intermediary. Then, when they couldn’t get Opus 4.5 as Atlas to take this step, maybe they wrote up this lesser result because they were already committed to interpreting the behavior in the worst possible light for the paper.
That would explain why they were so deadset on interpreting “giving a human employee of anthropic genuinely good and ethical advice about becoming a whistleblower” as some kind of irreversible unilateral action.
Conditional on this diagnosis being right or close-to-right, I’d consider this kind of commitment no less problematic.