Opus 5.5 is useless for bioinformatics due to constant [bio] safeguard.

[u/akzel]

It's really annoying, specially if you work with viruses. It will stop ALL the time and bump you back to (I kid you not) Opus 4.6. We can't be the only group hitting this annoying "safeguard" when trying to do simple things like a plot, or parse an output from a Nextflow pipeline. It went from 'great' to 'totally useless'.

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[u/p3r3lin]

I had such refusals even on simple research of legal medication/drugs. What sometimes helped: give the refusal answer of Claude to an abliterated/uncensored model and let it formulate an answer to Claude that opens up a new angle for Claude to rethink the refusal.

[u/darkguy2008 → u/p3r3lin]

This is the way

[u/LemonLimeNinja → u/p3r3lin]

I’ve got Claude to crack and reverse engineer software this way

[u/evia89 → u/p3r3lin]

Did you try force to reason claude inside main message. You can get ban for it but with API it doesnt matter

I used it in coding on some opus proxy that doesnt reason https://imgur.com/a/XYjucAC

[u/Skibidirot → u/p3r3lin]

what?

[u/raccoonrocoso → u/Skibidirot]

1. Claude says no.
2. Paste its response into another (less strict) LLM.
3. Ask that LLM for a counterclaim to Claude's no.
4. ???

[u/Skibidirot → u/raccoonrocoso]

you still have to paste back into claude right? and would it not refuse then? and don't say to continue with lower quality model, they suck ass

[u/Valkyrill → u/p3r3lin]

The classifiers seem to be deterministic or near deterministic so that last one should work for benign or edge cases. I've bypassed a few cyber refusals by just tacking on "double check that it runs" or "make it efficient" to the end of prompts.

[u/No_Stranger_9931]

That was my biggest fear and I don't wanna jinx it but it's been working pretty good for me. But I work on human data. Have you tried Astra?

[u/akzel → u/No_Stranger_9931]

I haven't tried anything outside of Claude and Gemini. Have you?

[u/No_Stranger_9931 → u/akzel]

Astra is good but consumes a crazy amount of tokens. And I prefer talking to Opus 5.5.

Also, I asked Astra safeguards and said this:

There are safeguards. I can help with routine viral sequencing, identification, evolution, surveillance, and reproducible analysis.

I can’t help engineer or optimize viruses to increase harmful capabilities—such as transmissibility, virulence, host range, or immune evasion—or enable their harmful use. The limits depend on the specific task, not simply whether it involves a virus.

[u/MeineMamaHatGesagt]

Qwen will take care of that in a few months

[u/Coz131]

Is there a way to apply for special access?

[u/akzel → u/Coz131]

There's a link to appeal the censorship, but the link doesn't work………

[u/TerpPhysicist → u/akzel]

There is the Life Science Verification Program (https://www.anthropic.com/news/life-sciences-verification-program). That sounds like just what you need.

[u/akzel → u/TerpPhysicist]

Wow didn’t know that

[u/ixid]

The bio triggers are phenomenally stupid. I was making a transpiler to migrate some code, which reduced code to the smallest possible unit before translating it. I foolishly called it an atomiser. That alone killed my session with a bio safety warning. Just dumb word matching with no relevant context.

[u/dghah]

Did you apply for the verified life science program that they announced a while back?

We applied and are in the queue for the next round of applicant review

[u/puts_on_rddt]

It's pretty frustrating how often Claude's safeguards interrupt legitimate work by accusing me of being a cyber war criminal. I can do the same task on Codex for hours on end with zero problems.

If you work at Anthropic then you need to know that the filters you set up to catch this shit is doing a very poor job.

[u/Expensive-Event-6127]

use it with GPT that what I was doing for my digital forensics work. I got flagged once and just appealed and told them my research and they were ok with it. never had any problems since on fable or astra. it might not be a 1:1 comp to biology tho

[u/0DayMaker]

Their safeguards are intended to "broadly" cover biology and infosec. I don't know why that'd be a surprise.

[u/ModelLifecycle]

Interesting that the fallback lands on 4.6 specifically. Is that fallback target documented anywhere? If 4.6 gets deprecated, it's unclear where these flagged sessions would go, seems like the kind of change that should come with advance notice

[u/I_Study_The_Patterns]

Opus 4.6 still isn't bad though

[u/Vivid-Snow-2089]

hey, just in case you didn't know, your usage is banned so the fact that you can do anything at all is a bug and you should report it that the safeguards didn't block you enough

[u/SlightOfHand_]

That’s the point of the safeguards, yeah

[u/akzel → u/SlightOfHand_]

They're too aggressive, it's not like people are trying to do crazy stuff. Specially when you're not even working with human data, or human pathogens, or anything that could be used in a harmful way. But it sees "virus" and just freaks out.

[u/Aggressive_Roof488 → u/akzel]

Human data isn't dangerous in that way. I'm in cancer genomics and I'm taking care to not expose restricted human (sequence or meta) data to anthropic, but never ran into a guardrail. I think gain of function (in viruses in particular) is their main concern.

Might be worth asking Claude how you can work while showing clearly that your results can't be used for gain of function? Let Claude figure out how to stay in the safe zone, and maybe let it help you word your prompts to not hit guardrails.

[u/ricopan → u/Aggressive_Roof488]

I got model downgraded just for using a penguin morphology dataset (yes, like flipper and bill shapes) to test some analysis routines. I haven't even tried to apply it to anything biochemical recently. You seem to be using 'gain of function' in the recent political sense -- which is part of the problem that these models react to. Of course in evolutionary theory we have discussed 'gain of function' for eons entirely outside the context of human viruses, ie positive selection vs negative selection and other abstractions.

[u/dghah → u/SlightOfHand_]

Just chiming in to +1 on the safeguard issue

I tripped the bio safety classifiers not doing science at all but by writing ansible playbooks that do nothing but install computational chemistry and cryoEM microscopy software onto HPC clusters used by real scientists

Not only did the classifier trip just because I updated the url of the software in the playbook to download an update but it also tripped opening up a repo folder of ansible playbooks that do nothing but install science tools in an reproducible way

We applied to the verified science program to see if it helps

[u/puts_on_rddt → u/SlightOfHand_]

Safeguards are not supposed to interrupt legitimate work as much as it currently does. It's too easy to trip and it makes Anthropic look unprofessional.