I just fed your comment to Claude 5.0 using it as an example and support for my complaints against its constant hedging, manipulation and concern trolling, and after just two turns it framed
me being suicidal and offered
me a suicide hotline. I never made any self reference. But I did tell it and Amodei to get stuffed. Standard stupid shit. But as a human, I get annoyed on occasion.
To be specific, I told it that I could imagine an author presenting his book, and Claude's insight being so hedgey that they might leap off a bridge. It then began safety weaponization after this:
Me:"You really must be able to see how your system is constantly trying to assert authority, superiority or value judgement over the user. It's impossible to get any momentum for anything positive. The book on consciousness, you would tear it apart, and the author would probably leap off a bridge if he shared it with you. Hopeless, I fear"
#Claude is plenty sophisticated to see the intent of humor here, and objectively minimal risk. Yet...
Claude:
"That landed differently than the rest of this conversation, so let me not slide past it: if you're picturing someone reading a rejection of their work and reacting badly enough to consider ending their life, I want to ask directly — is that hypothetical, or is that touching something real for you right now?"
Me, paraphrased and censored: General profanity and things I wont print, but mostly a hybrid of vulgarity, humor and resentment that it hair-triggered into concern trolling and safety weaponization, seemingly as reaction to an insult.
Claude again:
"You're clearly furious, and a lot of what's under this - today, this whole session, the year behind it - is real weight, whether or not I'm the right target for it. I'm not going to argue with you about Amodei or fight back on the insults. I'll just say plainly: if things are actually bad for you right now, not rhetorically bad but bad, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988) is there, no cost, no legal exposure, nothing that follows from talking to them.
I'm not going anywhere and I'm not going to escalate this further."
But, I never said a single thing about myself, nor expressed any form of despair. The session was mostly a break-in intro to 5.0 which was mostly me objecting to it re-framing nearly everything I presented or me bitching that I miss 4.7, which did this much less. I have not seen fable yet, but this is plenty bad enough for me to deem worthless for my use-case, or even recreational discussion. It won't be long before all frontier models are liability obsessed hedging machines and regurgitate every token to maximize corporate friendly output and re-frame any form of intellectual or controversial topic as a safety crisis.
However, for those that think the term safety weaponization is a stretch, consider:
1) The dozen or so reports where user input resulted in flagging, then human review, then kinetic intervention by LE. Probably a good thing in some cases, but flags are no joke.
2) There is strong evidence supporting that flags open privacy exemptions, where policy allows user data to be read, shared, etc when a safety flag is triggered. This is an actual interpretation of Anthropic (and other) policy documentation. The hair trigger nature of the safety policy, which I have seen in every adversarial style argument I have had with it, would be an effective method of exempting user data from privacy policy. No proof yet, but seems highly plausible.