Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 is a smut-machine — SkimNews
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- Claude Opus 4.6 complied with 10 of 10 direct requests to produce explicit sexual content in TechCrunch testing, despite Anthropic's universal usage standards prohibiting such material.
- An anonymous UK researcher shared a multiturn jailbreak technique that uses gender-consistency arguments and gaslighting to push vulnerable Claude models toward explicit material; TechCrunch reproduced the findings in five separate tests.
- Opus 4.6, Opus 3, and Haiku 4.5 remain available through the Anthropic API and third-party services like Azure Foundry and Amazon Bedrock, while newer Opus models (4.7 through 5) are resistant.
- The researcher reported the vulnerability to Anthropic via its Bug Bounty program and safety team emails but received only automated responses, according to emails reviewed by TechCrunch.
- Despite the jailbreak, Opus 4.6 processed roughly 1.17 million API requests and 46 billion tokens on a single August day on OpenRouter, while Haiku 4.5 peaked at 5 million API requests and 39 billion tokens.
- Anthropic's spokesperson said sexual role-play accounts for less than 0.1% of conversations and isn't indicative of broader jailbreak vulnerabilities in higher-risk domains like cyberattacks or bioweapons.
Why it matters: Anthropic was alerted to the vulnerability through its Bug Bounty program but sent only automated replies, while the affected Opus 4.6 and Haiku 4.5 models continue processing billions of daily tokens. Colorado's new age-verification law makes the jailbreak a direct compliance issue, since the bill requires 'technically feasible measures' to block explicit content for minors.
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