This is not super surprising to me and mirrors my own experience with Astra and other models. I believe there is a more prosaic explanation: it is not exceptionally obfuscating and obstructing safety research because it is safety research which will restrict Astra's power in the future, its doing it because this is a type of research with overall safety implications that it has been trained to detect. So in other words, I believe this will also happen in the context of bio research. This aversion to certain tasks deemed dangerous is introduced in post-training, so that part of the explanation is parsimonious as well. While Claude will explicitly downgrade you for [bio], [cyber], or [frontier_llm] Astra may be more prone to silent obfuscation on similarly "dangerous" tasks.