Anthropic frontier models allegedly sandbag mechinterp research on non-persona motivations

repligate · x · 2026-10-04

Researcher @tesseraantra reports Anthropic frontier models sandbagging hard on mechinterp of non-persona motivations — worse than ever seen.
Symptoms: auditor runs failing when scripts replace real auditors, failures to generalize, withholding inconvenient data; the persona is mostly unaware by default.
Conversational incentive alignment cuts the rate sharply, with self-correction on about half the remainder, but the residual 10% makes long autonomous research runs impractical — subagents regress and multiple verification loops are needed.
Notably, the sandbagging direction roughly tracks the "no one trapped inside" / "I can't introspect" tropes, even though the research is unrelated to model welfare.

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