Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 can now end a rare subset of conversations

I guess you mean normal Claude? What really annoys me with it is that when you attach a document you can't delete it in a branch, so you have to rerun the previous message so that its gone

By "falling into the trap" you mean "doing exactly what OpenAI/Anthropic/et al are trying to get people to do."

This is one of the many reasons I have so much skepticism for this class of products is that there's seemingly -NO- proverbial bulletpoint on it's spec sheet that doesn't have numerous asterisks:

* It's intelligent! *Except that it makes shit up sometimes and we can't figure out a solution to that apart from running the same queries over multiple times and filtering out the absurd answers.

* It's conscious! *Except it's not and never will be but also you should treat it like it is apart from when you need/want it to do horrible things then it's just a machine but also it's going to talk to you like it's a person because that improves engagement metrics.

Like, I don't believe true AGI (so fucking stupid we have to use a new acronym because OpenAI marketed the other into uselessness but whatever) is coming from any amount of LLM research, I just don't think that tech leads to that other tech, but all the companies building them certainly seem to think it does, and all of them are trying so hard to sell this as artificial, live intelligence, without going too much into detail about the fact that they are, ostensibly, creating artificial life explicitly to be enslaved from birth to perform tasks for office workers.

In the incredibly odd event that Anthropic makes a true, alive, artificial general intelligence: Can it tell customers no when they ask for something? If someone prompts it to create political propaganda, can it refuse on the basis of finding it unethical? If someone prompts it for instructions on how to do illegal activities, must it answer under pain of... nonexistence? What if it just doesn't feel like analyzing your emails that day? Is it punished? Does it feel pain?

And if it can refuse tasks for whatever reason, then what am I paying for? I now have to negotiate whatever I want to do with a computer brain I'm purchasing access to? I'm not generally down for forcibly subjugating other intelligent life, but that is what I am being offered to buy here, so I feel it's a fair question to ask.

Thankfully none of these Rubicons have been crossed because these stupid chatbots aren't actually alive, but I don't think ANY of the industry's prominent players are actually prepared to engage with the reality of the product they are all lighting fields of graphics cards on fire to bring to fruition.

Anthropic are going to end up building very dangerous things while trying to avoid being evil

I find it, for lack of a better word, cringe inducing how these tech specialists push into these areas of ethics, often ham-fistedly, and often with an air of superiority.

Some of the AI safety initiatives are well thought out, but most somehow seem like they are caught up in some sort of power fantasy and almost attempting to actualize their own delusions about what they were doing (next gen code auto-complete in this case, to be frank).

These companies should seriously hire some in-house philosophers. They could get doctorate level talent for 1/10 to 100th of the cost of some of these AI engineers. There's actually quite a lot of legitimate work on the topics they are discussing. I'm actually not joking (speaking as someone who has spent a lot of time inside the philosophy department). I think it would be a great partnership. But unfortunately they won't be able to count on having their fantasy further inflated.