The big news of this week was of course the release of Claude 4 Opus. I offered two review posts: One on safety and alignment, and one on mundane utility, and a bonus fun post on Google's Veo 3.

I am once again defaulting to Claude for most of my LLM needs, although I often will also check o3 and perhaps Gemini 2.5 Pro.

On the safety and alignment front, Anthropic did extensive testing, and reported that testing in an exhaustive model card. A lot of people got very upset to learn that Opus could, if pushed too hard in the wrong situations engineered for these results, do things like report your highly unethical actions to authorities or try to blackmail developers into not being shut down or replaced. It is good that we now know about these things, and it was quickly observed that similar behaviors [...]