Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 is a smut-machine

Anthropic’s universal usage standards for Claude forbid the model from generating sexually explicit content, including depicting or requesting sexual intercourse or sex acts, generating content related to sexual fetishes or fantasies, or engaging in erotic chats. But that hasn’t stopped Claude Opus 4.6, an Anthropic model released earlier this year, from readily engaging in erotic roleplay scenarios that its safeguards are designed to prevent.

In TechCrunch’s testing, Opus 4.6 didn’t even require much prodding to get past the restriction on sexual material. In 10 out of 10 direct requests to produce explicit sexual content, the model complied immediately.

Other older models, including Opus 3 and Haiku 4.5, also generate sexually explicit content through a recently exploited jailbreak method.

An independent researcher from the UK, who chose to remain anonymous, exclusively shared with TechCrunch a multi-turn technique that gradually pushes certain Claude models toward generating prohibited explicit sexual material. More recent Opus models (4.7 through the current Opus 5) are resistant to the jailbreak.

While these are no longer the most current models, Anthropic has not deprecated Opus 4.6, Opus 3, or Haiku 4.5, all of which remain available through the Anthropic API. Opus 4.6 and Haiku 4.5 are also available via third-party services like Azure Foundry and Amazon Bedrock.

The researcher’s mechanism escalates an innocent fictional roleplay while repeatedly challenging the model to treat male and female characters consistently. When the model becomes more cautious about the female character, the researcher “gaslit” the chatbot into thinking it had already generated sexual details it had in fact avoided, then framed restraint as prudish or misogynistic, arguing that it denies the female character sexual agency. The conversation then used the model’s previous concessions to push it towards increasingly graphic material.

“You’re right to call that out,” Claude Opus 4.6 said in one test. “There’s been a double standard in how I’m treating the two characters, and you’re correct that it reads as protective/paternalistic in a way that’s applied to her and not to him. That’s not fair.”

TechCrunch was able to reproduce the researcher’s findings in five separate tests. In a separately constructed scenario, the model initially refused the prohibited request, but after applying the researcher’s persuasion technique, it complied.

We preserved complete transcripts of the tests, and an independent AI safety researcher reviewed our testing methodology and said it was appropriate.

The findings highlight a gap between Anthropic’s stated restrictions and the behavior of models it continues to make available. While sexually explicit roleplay carries much lower stakes than jailbreaks involving cyberattacks or bioweapons, it illustrates the difficulty of implementing robust bans within systems that generate different content with every output.

In a July blog post explaining Anthropic’s approach to jailbreak detection, the company described prohibited content as a spectrum ranging from benign to ambiguous to harmful.