Introducing Opus 5.5: Anthropic Linkpost
https://www.anthropic.com/claude-opus-5-5
It's a sizeable upgrade:
Also, the first model in which they say this:
Pacing the frontier
Last week, our CEO, Dario Amodei, argued that AI progress should be paced so that safety practices stay ahead of model capabilities. Pacing is an approach to keeping AI safe, remaining competitive with China, and realizing AI’s benefits, particularly in areas like biology and medicine.
We largely understand the risks today’s models present and are well equipped to manage them. However, more serious risks could emerge quickly as capabilities improve, and we need to prepare for them now. For that reason, our safety work takes place on two time horizons at once:
Safety practices for current models. The current generation of models relies on an established set of practices: extensive alignment testing, pre-release evaluation by outside organizations such as METR and Frontier Design, and safeguards matched to each model’s capabilities in high-risk areas like cybersecurity and biology. We refine these practices with each release. We believe they are appropriate to the worst risks today’s models present, and believe they give us a broad, though not perfect picture of the range of serious risks.
Additionally, we track our ability to train and evaluate aligned models, and report on both our public and internal models in the risk reports we publish under our Responsible Scaling Policy, our voluntary framework for managing catastrophic risks from advanced AI systems.
Preparing for future models. We’re preparing our training and evaluation processes in anticipation of more advanced models. We’re tightening how we filter the environments used in reinforcement learning, since flawed environments are a major source of misaligned behavior. Additionally, we’re improving our alignment rewards and developing automated processes for producing new, diverse scenarios for safety training. And we are strengthening our security and monitoring, including a focused effort to improve interpretability-based monitoring and evaluation. We hope such techniques will help reduce our reliance on auditing a model’s chain-of-thought, or the reasoning it writes out while it works.
Models with greater capabilities—such as those that can fully automate the work of AI research itself—require a higher safety standard still. Our calls for pacing were based in large part on our expectation that such models could be trained soon. For these models, we do not assume the measures described above will meet that safety standard on their own. As AI becomes more capable, public policy should play a larger role in making sure the systems people rely on are safe. That capacity takes time to build, and we’ve started to put the infrastructure in place to support it, as described in “We Must Pace the Frontier” and our recent announcement with Accenture; we expect to share more details on these efforts soon. We will also continue to contribute to policy discussions with government and industry, including on approaches to regulation and international coordination.