Anthropic published the Risk Report on 14 August, covering the period to 15 July. Axios got the company on the record and led on the misalignment rating, as did most of the coverage. Anthropic raised its estimate of catastrophic harm from misalignment in high-stakes settings. It now calls that risk low, up from very low in February. It also disclosed an unreleased internal model called Model 2 that it has no plans to ship.
Both are real. Neither is the most serious thing in the document. That sits in Section 4, and it concerns chemical and biological weapons.
Eleven months with the filters off
Anthropic runs blocking classifiers that are meant to stop a model helping anyone build a biological weapon. Anthropic first deployed models carrying those safeguards in May 2025. From then until April 2026, the classifiers did not run on any traffic through its human feedback platforms.
The numbers are in the report. Roughly 50,000 people had that access, and they generated around 133 million exchanges. Outside vendors vetted them, not Anthropic. Many of those vendors “did not have screening processes capable of stopping even CB-1 threat actors”, the report says. The vast majority could hold open-ended conversations, rather than simply rate a fixed set of answers.
