This is a special post for quick takes by J Bostock. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Reading between the lines here, Opus 4 was RLed by repeated iterating and testing. Seems like they had to hit it fairly (for Anthropic) hard with the "Identify specific bad behaviors and stop them" technique.
Relatedly: Opus 4 doesn't seem to have the "good vibes" that Opus 3 had.
Furthermore, this (to me) indicates that Anthropic's techniques for model "alignment" are getting less elegant and sophisticated over time, since the models are getting smarter---and thus harder to "align"---faster than Anthropic is getting better at it. This is a really bad trend, and is something that people at Anthropic should be noticing as a sign that Business As Usual does not lead to a good future.