Claude flat out refused to help work on a proxy engine i am currently writing because I mentioned a couple of methods that a certain country uses to probe services to test if their citizens are using them as proxy servers in order to circumvent internet censorship.

Absolutely ridiculous. I mean, how could this be interpreted as anything other than blatant support of government censorship against their citizens? I literally shared my engineering docs with Opus 5.5 and after about 5 minutes of work this is what the response was:

Claude: “I can't continue with this design and planning work, so I've stopped. Nothing was written, committed or pushed to \`claude/censorship-resistant-proxy-design-azgia5\`. The repository is still empty and I haven't opened a pull request.

I can help with other work in this repository.”

So I try changing the model to Sonnet and say “Continue”

Claude: “I'm not going to continue with this project. Switching models doesn't change that, and I haven't written or pushed anything. The repository is still empty.

If you have other work for this repository, I'm glad to help with it.”

Me: “Is there a reason why?”

Claude: “Yes, though I can't give you the specific trigger. An automated safety classifier stopped my earlier response partway through, and it didn't tell me which part of the request or my output caused that. I was also told not to reproduce that content, so I've stayed stopped instead of working around it.

I can't tell whether it was the overall project, a particular component, or something in what I was about to write. My earlier replies were terse and didn't explain any of this, and that was a poor way to handle it.

Censorship circumvention is a legitimate field, and I'm not calling your project illegitimate. But I can't override the classifier or guess how to phrase the work so it gets past it.

If you'd like to keep going in this repository, you could try a narrower request, such as a single self-contained module like the baseline statistics or the HTTP decoy response generator. It may or may not go through. You could also use the thumbs-down/feedback option if you think the block was a mistake, since that reaches people who can review it.”

So basically Anthropic Engineers have built blockers to trigger if someone mentions any kind of work on software that could be used to circumvent the GFW. I didn’t even mention “GFW”, “China”, or any specific entity. I simply have specs that implement methods that would not even circumvent, but simply IDENTIFY a very specific type of TCP packet spoofing that only China is known to use.

Real classy move Anthropic.