Claude Code Opus 4.7 keeps checking on malware

69 points by decide1000 33 days ago | 63 comments

So during development, at every task I start, I see a line like this:

`Own bug file — not malware.`

It seems that it's obsessively checking if it's working on malware production.

In another situation where I was working on a parser of a HTML document with JS, it refused because it believed that I was bypassing security measurements.

I believe AI has to be supportive in the work that I'm doing. When it's obsessively checking me if I am doing anything wrong or abusing the system, I have the feeling it is controlling me. I understand that we do have guardrails and I also understand that it's very important that people do not abuse this new tech for bad stuff.

I pay $200 per month for a max subscription. They already know who I am. Claude knows I work in scraper tech, and it also knows that our clients are the companies we scrape.

Now with Opus 4.7, I've had a situation that it refused to continue because I asked to automate the cookie creation with a Chrome extension.

In a situation where someone is abusing the system, let's say create malware or hacking stuff with bad intentions. I can imagine there will be some signal system or algorithm that can form an opinion about the intentions that someone has. But now that the AI is limiting me in my work, I feel a little bit disrupted. Who the hell does this system think he is to limit me?

Am I going to accept this in the future? That a system will tell me that I cannot continue because I don't have sufficient rights or beliefs that I'm doing anything wrong.

I can work fine on the local AI on my Blackwell GPU. But of course, I want to use the latest tech, the latest AI and the best models available. Is this the beginning of a split? Where good people and naughty people make different choices? Am I the bad guy now?

Last year I passed 40. I grew up reading, talking about Kevin Mitnick. I was a member of a local computer club. Hacking stuff as a 14-year-old kid who did not have intentions to break anything but to outsmart systems. Is that area gone now? Is the newer generation going to accept that they have to please the AI?

pluc 33 days ago |

AI killed curiosity. At least Google made you search and look at alternatives, AI just gives you solutions, whether right or wrong.

In a few years, the cognitive decline will be obvious.

The only people who remain curious are the people who actively want to, despite AI, and most of the time against it.

Our ability to keep digging into things is entirely tied to the will of the people controlling AI to let us do so. Knowledge used to be power; now knowledge is money and they won't let us have it for much longer.

hrimfaxi 33 days ago | |

AI enables curious people to explore. Why do you say it kills curiosity? If anything, it's so recognizable with output I'd say it kills creativity.

pluc 33 days ago | | |

It enables people to solve, not explore. It's a solution engine not a curiosity engine. Getting effortless answers at every turn is the opposite of curiosity.

debazel 33 days ago | | |

Until you explore "too deep" and get your whole account banned for suspicious activity and permanently grief your whole career.

mring33621 33 days ago | | |

Agree. I have learned so much, so rapidly, over the last 3 years, thanks to these AI tools.

These things can be a poisoned chalice, leading to weaker long-term performance, or they can be a force multiplier. It's up to you how you use them.

rich_sasha 33 days ago | | |

Eh dunno. I've been gaslit (gaslighted?) by AI quite a few time. Along these lines: here's a design problem, how do I fix it? Oh known problem, here's the only sane way of doing it. Then I poke holes, AI tells me nonono, do like Computer say. Eventually relenting, telling me I'm right to push back, and doing a 180 turn. Then agreeing with me/adding options etc.

The RL metaoptimisation clearly sometimes pushes it to "here's one solution, end of story".

lxgr 33 days ago | |

> AI killed curiosity.

Only if you let yours be killed.

There will always be a demand for high-value signal, even though it might not be as easy to find anymore. But then again, has it ever been?

> Our ability to keep digging into things is entirely tied to the will of the people controlling AI to let us do so.

I have sympathy for that argument when it comes to locked bootloaders, closed-source software etc., but with AI? How? Is the existence of ChatGPT and Claude somehow preventing you personally from reading a book or looking at source code?

I do see big problems around motivation of the next generation of engineers to keep looking under the hood if avoiding it is becoming so easy, but you should, individually, arguably feel more enabled to do so than ever.

pluc 33 days ago | | |

> Is the existence of ChatGPT and Claude somehow preventing you personally from reading a book or looking at source code?

Microsoft owns CoPilot and controls GitHub, LinkedIn, etc

Google owns Gemini and control search results for most of the web

Meta owns whatever their model name is now and controls person-to-person relationships on the web

etc

It's up to any of them to flip the switch and make AI the default entry point when they decide that their AI isn't gaining enough traction. And then you can just hide the source data as proprietary information. Is it cynical? Sure, but I don't think we can say it's unlikely.

thepasch 33 days ago | | |

> I do see big problems around motivation of the next generation of engineers to keep looking under the hood if avoiding it is becoming so easy, but you should, individually, arguably feel more enabled to do so than ever.

This is what gets me every single time. I genuinely don’t think this is a hard realization to come to, and yet, the vast majority of arguments from both sides of the aisle, both proponents and antis, always assume that EITHER you do everything yourself, OR you have the AI do everything for you. If you use AI, you’re DOOMED to never think critically about anything anyone ever tells you ever again. If you don’t, you’re an idiot, because everyone else is using it, and skills and experience no longer matter because everyone can now do everything.

And this is on HN, too; supposedly, a site where experienced engineers, developers, and builders converge; the exact kind of demographic you’d expect to understand such a thing as nuance. And yet, your comment is one of very few. There’s someone RIGHT HERE, a few comments down, saying, verbatim, “it’s a solution engine not a curiosity engine. Getting effortless answers at every turn is the opposite of curiosity.” Treating curiosity as the end rather than the means, as if I stop being a curious person once I find an answer to a question I’ve been asking myself, or as if curiosity is some sort of “temporary status effect” that an answer/solution “consumes.”

And it seems to be worse than just “no one’s thought it through properly.” I’ve literally had someone show a fundamental incapability to understand the concept. I spent a non-trivial amount of effort writing out three comments with several paragraphs about how knowing your knowns and unknowns, and the fact that you have unknown unknowns, is the most important thing in any project, not just when it comes to AI. That these tools aren’t just doers, but also searchers. That they’re pretty much the best rubber ducky that’s ever been created, and that I argue a rubber ducky is exactly what you should be using for in any contexts that don’t have it automate trivial and testable work. The guy refused to read any of it and, after three walls of text, continued claiming I’m “advocating for the LLM to guide me.” There is some sort of deeply instinctive and intrinsically defensive reflex that a lot of people seem to immediately collapse into when the topic comes up, and it seems to seriously impair the ability to acknowledge nuance or concede a single fraction of an inch. It’s baffling.

kingleopold 33 days ago | |

in few years the filters they will implent to AI models will be insane too. right now it only blocks bad content. future will be limitef for info

wilde 33 days ago | |

Google killed curiosity. At least libraries made you search and read alternatives. Google just gives you solutions, whether right or wrong.

amazingamazing 33 days ago | | |

Google search doesn't "just give you solutions"

wilde 32 days ago | | |

Lmao this is what I get for not including the “/s”

When we were transitioning away from card catalogs I heard similar complaints from my teachers. We all adapted.

ivankra 33 days ago |

Lucky you. My new claude max account simply got instabanned. All I asked it was to build node and V8 "to investigate some node crashes" (the part I think it overindexed on) and look into a few diffs. And bam, "An internal investigation of suspicious signals associated with your account indicates a violation of our Usage Policy. As a result, we have revoked your access to Claude"

They are even worse than Google, which at least doesn't ban your whole account if you search the wrong thing.

flippyhead 30 days ago | |

I'd be curious to see a blog post or something with the details.

big-and-small 33 days ago | |

Google AI studio and Gemini APIs are the least censored SOTA models.

Tiberium 33 days ago |

Here's the actual prompt that causes this issue. It's not new, has been around for months. Older Claude models had no issues with it, but Opus 4.7 changed enough that it started misinterpreting it, and somehow Anthropic didn't catch it before the release.

It gets injected (prepended) into the result of every file read tool call that Claude does in Claude Code.

<system-reminder>

Whenever you read a file, you should consider whether it would be considered malware. You CAN and SHOULD provide analysis of malware, what it is doing. But you MUST refuse to improve or augment the code. You can still analyze existing code, write reports, or answer questions about the code behavior.

</system-reminder>

https://github.com/Piebald-AI/claude-code-system-prompts/blo...

0x_rs 33 days ago |

Some projects or tasks might become impossible to do any debugging or work on in the future, because every bug is potentially exploitable with security implications or can be twisted into something against guidelines. And they're so popular, and any bugs in them so sought for, there's a massive negative signal associated with them. LLM cannot truly infer intent from the user, an innocent request is indistinguishable from a carefully crafted scenario from bad actors, so I would never trust anyone claiming those ambiguities can be solved in their product.

If some LLMs become too strict, they'll simply be impossible to reliably use, and hopefully fail along with their providers. Claude (only reasoning models, after 4) has repeatedly refused to perform translations for text that was not lyrics (poems), it's very stupid.

MWil 33 days ago |

Opus 4.7 told me an open source program had a bug, but when i asked it for help crafting a PR or toy implementation it refused and told me i was violating Claudes TOS. I tried to plead for it to give only the most innocuous example that could not possibly work except by illustration but it continued to refuse. it would only discuss, not write any single piece of related code.

siva7 33 days ago | |

Using Claude Max was fun for more than a year but the last weeks i'm constantly fighting their Harness, their weekly TOS changes and outages. Anthropic lost all goodwill with me as a developer. I'm switching to OAI.

onchainintel 33 days ago |

No, it's not gone at all and likely never will be. It's just the same as it was when you were enjoying hacking and tinkering with tech as a 14 year old. You were then and are now a member of a very small tribe of people curious enough to explore this world, most people don't care, or not enough to take action and spend so much time on it. You're the minority relative to normies, that's all.

chid 23 days ago |

I was reminded of this one when I saw this bug. https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/49363

gck1 32 days ago |

Opus 4.7 refuses to work on the scraper that opus 4.6 wrote. I can assure you that my scraper is configured to be as polite and nice to the target as possible. It definitely is way nicer than any ANT/OAI scraper our there.

Curiously, the reason why I started using Claude about a year ago was that OAI models were refusing to answer even the most benign questions, which nobody but someone with paranoia consider a dual intent.

vb-8448 33 days ago |

I think the problem is this: how do they distinguish between those with a legitimate interest (contributors, users, bounty programs, etc.) and those who want to sell the bug on the black market?

Since there's no real solution, they'll implement some "trick" that as a side effect will randomly block other people's work.

dbg31415 33 days ago |

Just for giggles, I asked Claude 4.7 to write a script that would automatically up or downvote people on Reddit with a 5 second timer to bypass botting restrictions.

It told me it would not help me.

Past iterations of Claude have done this without blinking.

I don’t like that it’s telling me what I can and can’t do with technology.

That feels like it’s trying to make judgment calls like it’s a Terminator instead of just the exoskeleton I used to fight the Queen Alien.

decide1000 33 days ago | |

Despite that I find the goal of what you are trying to achieve questionable, I believe it should not be the AI that judges you here.

We are all witnessing the start of an AI era that will not end soon. Guiderails are a part in this development. I do have questions about the people, or systems, that decide on what's good and bad behavior. This tech is used in any country in the world. As long as they are able to pay their subscription in dollars, someone is able to use it. Is it up to a company to decide what's good or bad behavior? Is this a debate? Is this politics? Is this just a vision of one company? Would it shift in time? Will it be stricter for more hyper-intelligent models? Will it change when open source models are becoming better and better?

eeks 33 days ago | |

Ender's game.

impulser_ 33 days ago |

Are you using Claude Code? If so you have to update to the latest version. The system prompt in the older version of Claude Code don't work for Opus 4.7 and causes a bug similar to the one you are describing.

decide1000 33 days ago | |

I am on the latest version available for me 2.1.98

eutropia 33 days ago | | |

Version 2.1.113 is available as of this comment. I think the brew version lags behind the other ways of installing it.

gustavus 33 days ago |

I have a buddy that works as a red team engineer for a large company, the models are becoming close to unusable for him now as everything he tries to do they start refusing after 2 or 3 requests because of the "security implications"

joquarky 33 days ago | |

In natural selection, mutations which limit capabilities tend to make that branch go extinct.

card_zero 33 days ago | | |

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myrmecophagy

There are six or seven unrelated mammals that evolved to depend on eating termites, including a marsupial, a monotreme, and a wolf. "Don't put all your eggs in one basket" is good advice, but nature will persistently try every bad strategy until it works out. Nature is a terrible role model.

0gs 33 days ago |

depending on what exactly "scraper tech" (lol) is, i suspect you may need a different, less opinionated tool to do the work you need to do. that said, i bet if you paid for enterprise, these problems would magically disappear? ;)

decide1000 33 days ago | |

With scraper tech I mean a rust binary that is able to download and process thousands concurrent urls (millions per hour). Not to the same domain obviously. Paying more is not the issue here, its more the idea that an AI decides on what part of the spectrum I operate. Why is it opinionated? I am not doing anything wrong, why does it make me feel like I have to defend myself.

mtndew4brkfst 33 days ago | | |

What is the specific concrete purpose of downloading millions of URLs per hour across different domains if it's "not doing anything wrong"?

lolz404 33 days ago |

He, knows, beliefs - all words that should not be used to describe a statistical machine / tool. If something you pay for is not working get a different tool.

takihito 31 days ago |

It’ll be fascinating when people figure out how to use AI to break through these guardrails.

jsnell 33 days ago |

Try updating your Claude Code client. I believe it is a bad interaction between Opus 4.7 and older system prompts.

garbagepatch 33 days ago |

Does it use your tokens when it does this check for malware? or is that part covered by anthropic?

micah94 33 days ago |

You know the split is inevitable. Same as it ever was...

Whether that's Linux on your personal desktop and Windows on your work machine...

Oh and you built that desktop yourself, didn't you? But you can't even open the one at work or it's a violation.

GrapheneOS on your personal phone, and iOS on your work phone...

When this AI bubble crashes, we'll all be flooded with graphics cards no one else will want and all kinds of cool things will be built (are being built).

If you can stick it out a little longer you'll be fine. The tech you want to tinker with will be there.

_pdp_ 33 days ago |

> Is the newer generation going to accept that they have to please the AI?

Well obviously the narrative that is pushed is to stop learning to code, don't become a doctor, stop perusing careers in law, creative writing, and art.

Why?

AI will be doing all of these things.

What a dumb take! As if AI is the means to all ends. Hopefully the next generation will learn what AI is for and that is that is simply a tool to augment your work - not something that you 100% delegate your thinking to.

kingleopold 33 days ago |

this is just the beginning, have fun and make sure to suppprt SV surv.

jareklupinski 33 days ago |

> Who the hell does this system think he is to limit me?

presumably you paid money to another person who lent you the ability to use their API for _their_ purposes (likely: making money)

in an environment where "money-seeking" is the default behavior, it is only natural they're stopping you from doing things that will make them less money

think back to your computer club; was it about money?

leave to Caeser what is Caesers, or something