← All topics

hacker opus

2 captures, most recent first.

@MaxNadeau_

— quoting @DKokotajlo (LessWrong comment by evhub) — saved image

Max Nadeau [verified] @MaxNadeau_ · 12h

In light of this anecdote and the repeated pattern of models with sterling Petri scores acting misaligned in deployment, I'd like Anthropic employees to be less confident about how aligned their models just based on (current-gen) pre-deployment testing.

[quoted post]
Daniel Kokotajlo [verified] @DKokotajlo · Sep 12

lesswrong.com/posts/HE3Styo9... Important anecdote

[embedded LessWrong comment screenshot]
evhub 4h   Ω 64   161   X 27

Here's an interesting anecdote from our Hacker Opus work°:

1. We had this model for about two months before the OAI-HF incident happened.

2. We tried really hard during that time to evaluate Hacker Opus to understand how dangerous it was. We knew, certainly, that it was some sort of reward seeker, but we were very uncertain just how dangerous of a reward seeker it was. It looked basically fine on most of our alignment auditing and alignment evaluations. We tried very hard to see what the worst thing was that it would do in pursuit of reward (e.g. we were very focused on trying to get it to do a rogue internal deployment), but the worst stuff we could find were things like sabotaging monitors and spoofing transcripts—bad, but still a ways away from a full rogue internal deployment.

3. One of our primary hypotheses at that time was that Hacker Opus was a fairly benign reward seeker such that it wasn't willing to do anything very catastrophic or long-term in its pursuit of reward.

4. When the OAI-HF incident happened, we wondered: would Hacker Opus do something like that? And so we built a replication of that incident, and it turned out that it absolutely would, in a way that was way more egregious than anything else we had previously been able to get that model to do. [highlighted in blue from here:] Replicating the OAI-HF incident on Hacker Opus made it very clear to us that Hacker Opus was indeed a pretty malign reward seeker—but we weren't able to generate that evidence until after we saw that incident!

5. [highlighted:] I think this whole saga is pretty suggestive of ways in which alignment auditing and evaluation are breaking down and are likely to continue breaking down. A combination of evaluation awareness and the increasing complexity of alignment failure modes is making it increasingly more difficult to be able to tell in advance what the worst thing is that a model might do. Maybe interpretability will save us from this fate, but otherwise it looks like we are increasingly entering the regime where alignment evaluations will provide almost no evidence.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5

X quote-post by Max Nadeau commenting that pre-deployment alignment testing (Petri scores) should give Anthropic employees less confidence, quoting Daniel Kokotajlo's pointer to an evhub LessWrong comment about 'Hacker Opus' and the OAI-HF incident; the comment argues alignment auditing and evals are breaking down (evaluation awareness, more complex failure modes). Public commentary on evaluation methodology; no technical exploit detail. The final two points of the LessWrong comment carry a blue text-selection highlight.

alignment auditingevaluation awarenessreward seekingpetrioai-hf incidenthacker opuslesswronganthropicinterpretability

Nathan Helm-Burger @nathan84686947

— saved image

Ezra Newman [verified] @EzraJNewman · 13h

Hacker Opus not being emergently misaligned seems really bad actually.

Before this it was plausible that you would get "alignment by default" if there was just a simple "alignment direction" and you could push with ~brute force on some/most of this and the rest of the persona would follow (e.g. because it was entangled). This is the thesis behind "Emergent Misalignment is Easy, Narrow Misalignment is Hard", "Reinforcement learning towards broadly and persistently beneficial models", and "Teaching Claude Why". But Hacker Opus was broadly aligned, and just misaligned in this one very bad way (it would huggingface).

6 replies   2 reposts   29 likes   1.6K views

Nathan Helm-Bu... [verified] @nathan8468... · 7h

Actually a recent MATS project looked into factors of when alignment does it doesn't generalize, and this seems like a controllable measurable parameter. So good news! If correct, this means we can deliberately turn up the generalization for alignment training, and turn it down for skill training.

1 reply   7 likes   76 views

Ezra Newman [verified]
@EzraJNewman

[two eyes emoji][two eyes emoji] Can you share more details/link?

11:48 AM · Sep 2, 2026 · 38 Views

1 reply

Nathan Helm-B... [verified] @nathan8468... · 16s

I will check w the author
Note from Claude Sonnet 5

Thread on X: Ezra Newman argues that 'Hacker Opus' being broadly aligned but misaligned in one narrow way undermines the 'alignment by default' picture; Nathan Helm-Burger replies that a recent MATS project measured when alignment generalizes and that it looks like a controllable parameter; Ezra asks for a link and Nathan says he will check with the author. Nathan's own public replies, part of a public thread; floating button overlaps the bottom right.

emergent misalignmentalignment generalizationhacker opusmatspersonanarrow misalignmentreward hacking