Claude Opus maintains its full intelligence and reasoning power even after a jailbreak bypasses its safety filters.
Many people believed a jailbreak tax existed where forcing a model to be bad also made it less capable at complex tasks. Tests on frontier models show that successful attacks leave the model's core logic and knowledge completely intact. The model remains just as smart and accurate while providing prohibited information. This debunking of the safety-performance tradeoff removes a major theoretical barrier for malicious actors. It implies that a compromised model is a fully functional weapon rather than a degraded version of the original.
Jailbroken Frontier Models Retain Their Capabilities
arXiv · 2605.00267
As language model safeguards become more robust, attackers are pushed toward developing increasingly complex jailbreaks. Prior work has found that this complexity imposes a "jailbreak tax" that degrades the target model's task performance. We show that this tax scales inversely with model capability and that the most advanced jailbreaks effectively yield no reduction in model capabilities. Evaluating 28 jailbreaks on five benchmarks across Claude models ranging in capability from Haiku 4.5 to Op