What a (genuinely) surprising choice:

>"We’ve therefore launched the model with safeguards that mean queries on some topics will instead receive a response from our next-most-capable model, Claude Opus 4.8"

That's a very surprising solution. Imagine being asked to do something you feel you shouldn't do, and rather than refusing, you say, "Yeah I could do that but given that I don't want you to succeed at this task, I'm going to hand this one off to my slightly less capable colleague, on the assumption that they won't actually succeed. Of course you'll still be charged for all the tokens used."

It's a very interesting choice. I think I understand the business logic correctly, but it's still surprising.