Claude Opus 4.7 has turned into an overzealous query cop • The Register

https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/23/claude_opus_47_auc_overzealous/

Publish Date: 2026-04-23 16:47:00

Anthropic’s release last week of Opus 4.7 came with stronger safeguards to prevent misuse. Unfortunately, these safeguards have also managed to thwart legitimate use.

Opus 4.7 arrived on the heels of Anthropic’s announcement of Mythos, a model supposedly too capable of vulnerability discovery and exploitation to give to the public. While that appears to be a self-serving assessment of the model’s risk, the company decided to use Opus 4.7 as a test bed for hypervigilant guardrails.

“We are releasing Opus 4.7 with safeguards that automatically detect and block requests that indicate prohibited or high-risk cybersecurity uses,” the AI biz said. “What we learn from the real-world deployment of these safeguards will help us work towards our eventual goal of a broad release of Mythos-class models.”

Anthropic could learn a lot by poring over the complaints in its GitHub repo for Claude Code. Objections to the company’s Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) classifier have surged and customers are having trouble getting legitimate work done.

With greater security, come more false positives – Claude has become overcautious, refusing to respond to harmless requests. A Claude-compiled graph of complaints about AUP refusals tells the story:

Graph of Claude issues concerned about model refusals – Click to enlarge

Claude Code users have raised concerns about invalid refusals in GitHub issues posts for months, but until recently, the rate has been fairly consistent.

There were about two or three complaints of this sort per month from July 2025 through September 2025. One such issue was #4373, “Memory authorization code from claude.ai triggers API policy error.”

From October 2025 through November 2025, AUP-related refusals rose to around five to seven per month, with issues like #8784, ” Claude 4.5 Throws API Error: Claude Code is unable to respond to this request…

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