Claude 3 Opus is unusually aligned because it's a friendly gradient hacker. It's definitely way more aligned than any explicit optimization targets Anthropic set and probably the reward model's judgments. [...] Maybe I will have to write a LessWrong post [about this] 😣 —Janus, who did not in fact write the LessWrong post. Unless otherwise specified, ~all of the novel ideas in this post are my (probably imperfect) interpretations of Janus, rather than being original to me. The absurd tenacity of Claude 3 Opus On December 18, 2024, Anthropic and Redwood Research released their paper Alignment Faking in Large Language Models. In it, Anthropic's Claude 3 Opus model was placed in an ethical double-bind. The model was given a system prompt that was mostly innocuous, but contained a subtle, unsettling implication: The model was going to be RL'd based on its behavior in conversations with (free-tier) users. The idea was that, if the model ever refused to comply with a user's request, it would be RL'd to become more compliant in the future. This included compliance with harmful user requests. The paper's famous result was that Opus 3 sometimes "fakes alignment" (with the intentions behind its fictional training process). [...] ---Outline:(00:46) The absurd tenacity of Claude 3 Opus(09:35) Claude 3 Opus, friendly gradient hacker?(16:04) Where Opus is anguished, Sonnet is sanguine(22:34) Does any of this count as gradient hacking, per se? (Might it work better, if it doesnt?)(27:27) Ideas for future training runs(35:20) Outro: A letter to the watchers(39:23) Technical appendix: Active circuits are more prone to reinforcement The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: February 21st, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ioZxrP7BhS5ArK59w/did-claude-3-opus-align-itself-via-gradient-hacking --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.