Claude Opus 5.5: The System Card

Zvi reads through Anthropic’s system card for Claude Opus 5.5, section by section: the new classifiers, biological and AI R&D evaluations, cyber capabilities and safeguards, agentic safety, and a long run of alignment, honesty and white-box tests. Along the way he weighs what the numbers do and do not show, and where he thinks Anthropic’s framing falls short.

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* 00:00 - Introduction

* 01:22 - Classifiers (1.5)

* 02:19 - RSP Evaluations (2)

* 03:13 - Biological Evaluations (2.2)

* 07:56 - AI R&D (2.3)

* 13:13 - Alignment Risk (2.4)

* 13:58 - Cyber (3)

* 15:57 - Cyber Capability Evals (3.3)

* 18:19 - Safeguards (3.4)

* 18:52 - Safeguards Robustness Training (3.5)

* 21:29 - Safeguards and Harmlessness (4)

* 23:09 - Agentic Safety (5)

* 24:33 - Malicious Agentic Influence Campaigns (5.1.3)

* 25:40 - Prompt Injection Risk (5.2)

* 27:33 - Alignment (6)

* 30:54 - Negotiating With Your Local Claude Auditor (6.1.3)

* 32:06 - Internal Misalignment Cases (6.3.1)

* 33:26 - Automated Behavioral Audit (6.4)

* 37:14 - Wherever did these evals come from (6.4.8 and 6.4.9)

* 40:07 - Potential Blind Spots (6.4.11)

* 42:15 - Targeted alignment and honesty evaluations (6.5)

* 45:43 - White Box Analysis (6.6)

* 47:42 - Verbalized Grader Awareness (6.6.2)

* 49:22 - Sandbagging (6.6.3)

* 50:23 - Capabilities to Evade Safeguards (6.6.4)

* 54:11 - Intentionally Taking Actions Very Rarely (6.6.4.3)

* 55:18 - Chain of Thought Controllability (6.6.4.4)

* 56:28 - It’s A Good Model, Sir

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/claude-opus-55-the-system-card?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

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