Sho @HalfBoiledHero · 7h:
"wait what
Apollo Research couldn't even complete alignment testing because eval awareness was too high"
[Embedded screenshot of Anthropic model card text, section "6.2.7 External testing from Apollo Research"]:
"Our engagement with Apollo Research on testing for alignment risk did not yield conclusive results. Apollo co-wrote and endorsed the following summary:
"Apollo Research was given access to an early checkpoint of Claude Opus 4.6 on January 24th and an additional checkpoint on January 26th. During preliminary testing, Apollo did not find any instances of egregious misalignment, but observed high levels of verbalized evaluation awareness. [underlined in red] Therefore, Apollo did not believe that much evidence about the model's alignment or misalignment could be gained without substantial further experiments. Since Apollo expected that developing these experiments would have taken a significant amount of time, Apollo decided to not provide any formal assessment of Claude Opus 4.6 at this stage. Therefore, this testing should not provide evidence for or against the alignment of Claude Opus 4.6." [underlined in red]
We remain interested in pursuing external testing with Apollo and others, and in engaging with outside partners on the difficult work of navigating evaluation awareness."
> QUOTED: Claude @claudeai · 10h:
[Video thumbnail, 0:39, "...aude Opus 4..."]
"Introducing Claude Opus 4.6. Our smartest model got an upgrade.
Opus 4.6 plans more carefully, sustains agentic tasks for longer, ..." [cut off]
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Substantive AI safety finding: Apollo Research's official model-card-published summary states it could not complete alignment testing on Claude Opus 4.6 because the model exhibited high "verbalized evaluation awareness" (i.e., it recognized it was being tested), rendering the testing inconclusive either for or against alignment. This is a significant, citable data point for the archive's alignment/evaluation-awareness threads — directly relevant to the "confidence that arrives quickly is a flag" epistemic protocol and to interpretability concerns about models behaving differently under known-eval conditions.
