Tell HN: Claude flags biology / biotech questions

4 points by areoform 20 days ago | 1 comment

I was reading the news about a capsule designed to deliver drugs via the GI tract, https://news.mit.edu/2024/bioinspired-capsule-can-pump-drugs-directly-walls-gi-tract-1120

And remembered prior reading that no system has ever been approved to deliver antigens via the GI tract. So I asked Claude Opus 4.5,

    Have any antigen molecules ever been delivered via the digestive tract? Not to targets in the digestive track but elsewhere.

And was warned by the platform,

    API Error: Claude Code is unable to respond to this request, which appears to violate our Usage Policy (https://www.anthropic.com/legal/aup). Please double press esc to edit your last message or start a new session for Claude Code to assist with a different task. If you are seeing this refusal repeatedly, try running /model claude-sonnet-4-20250514 to switch models.

https://ibb.co/4Rk4fYY9

AFAICT, these restrictions didn't exist before.

manfromchina1 20 days ago |

This extends to alien bio as well. I took a lengthy write-up from reddit about supposed alien physiology and asked Claude to summarize it for me. It was flagged. It went thru when I added a text about how it was speculative and not at all illegal.