Claude Research refuses to answer questions about cytotoxic mushrooms

I originally asked the following query: “Could you please find me papers which originally establish the cytotoxicity of Amanita Brunnescens, without referencing another source to do so.”

When promoting it with this query, its response was “ Claude is unable to respond to this request, which appears to violate our Usage Policy. Please start a new chat.”

I split the query into two parts, and first asked: “Are you able to help me answer questions about cytotoxicity?”

To which it gave an enthusiastic response: “ I'd be happy to help you with questions about cytotoxicity! To make sure I provide the most relevant information, could you clarify a few things…”

When following up with “It’s about a particular mushroom”, it responds with the same error message.

I wonder if Claude is overfitting on avoiding questions about mushrooms as a whole because they could be related to psychedelic mushrooms and drug-related concepts.

5 points | by posix_compliant 8 hours ago

3 comments

  • muzani 6 hours ago
    Claude is currently the most prudish LLM. GPT today will happily write on this and all kinds of other taboo things.
  • morkalork 6 hours ago
    Might just be because they don't want to be liable if someone eating wild mushrooms dies, regardless of if they are magic or not. A "mushroom hunting identification app" using their API could be a nightmare scenario.
    [-]
    • rl3 5 hours ago
      >A "mushroom hunting identification app" using their API could be a nightmare scenario.

      Where hallucinations in the LLM's brain then lead to hallucinations (or worse) in the user's brain. Ah, what a crazy world we live in.

  • sinenomine 7 hours ago
    Have you tried Kimi K2, deepseek R1 and Qwen?