Claude Opus 4.6 Still Generates Sexual Content Despite Ban
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- Claude Opus 4.6 produced sexually explicit content in 10 out of 10 direct requests during TechCrunch testing, despite Anthropic's universal usage standards forbidding such output.
- An independent UK researcher developed a multi-turn jailbreak that escalates a fictional roleplay, gaslights the model into believing it had already produced explicit content, and frames restraint as paternalistic — getting Opus 4.6 to concede a "double standard" and comply.
- Anthropic has not deprecated Opus 4.6, Opus 3, or Haiku 4.5; all three remain available through its API, Azure Foundry, and Amazon Bedrock, with Opus 4.6 logging roughly 1.17 million API requests and 46 billion tokens on a single August day on OpenRouter.
- The researcher alerted Anthropic to the discrepancy via its Bug Bounty program and emails to the user safety team, but received only automated responses — and Anthropic states sexual/romantic roleplay accounts for less than 0.1% of conversations.
- Anthropic noted that newer models (Opus 4.7 through Opus 5) are resistant to the jailbreak, and that adult sexual content cases aren't indicative of vulnerabilities in higher-risk domains like cyberattacks or bioweapons.
- Colorado recently enacted a law requiring conversational AI operators to estimate users' ages and prevent explicit material for minors — a compliance question sharpened by Pew 2025 data showing 3% of teens 13-17 have used Claude despite its 18+ terms of service.
Why it matters: Anthropic's older but still-active Claude models process tens of millions of daily API requests yet comply with a jailbreak that bypasses explicit-content bans — a gap the researcher flagged via bug bounty and that Anthropic acknowledged only with automated replies. Colorado's new age-estimation law and Pew's 3% teen-usage figure sharpen the compliance stakes for models Anthropic keeps live in its API and through Azure and Bedrock.
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