Today, Anthropic officially released Claude Opus 4.7, the most powerful AI model available to the general public. On paper, it is promised to be a beast: a notable leap in advanced software engineering, substantially better vision for analysis capabilities and a new "self-verification" mode that allows it to audit its own work before it reports back to the user.
But there is a shadow hanging over this launch. For the first time in the history of frontier AI, a company has admitted to purposely making a model dumber in order to protect the world from it. Let me explain.
