Interesting. I pasted the article URL into Claude Opus 4.8, along with some questions about uses for cells that couldn't reproduce and Claude thought about it for a while, and then got murdered by the guardrails. I was invited to edit the question and try again; in a different chat. Or use a dumber model.
I suppose I can see why. But at the time I was just curious about the idea of "mule" cells.
Red blood cells can't reproduce and are "mule" cells - bags of hemoglobin. They are not really alive, so maybe not exactly what you were thinking of.
What are the guardrails here?
I've read than even a lot of high school biology questions can set off safety guardrails on Claude.
A lot of high school biology underpins the most immediate interesting aspects of chemistry and biology, and also the most volatile and dangerous ones.
I'm curious what you asked? I had Opus 4.8 ingest the URL and give me some ideas about what's possible and it eventually got to AI and self repairing/improving factories along with listing risks etc.
Here's what I asked it:
"The idea of a cell that didn't reproduce at all occurred to me. Maybe created by a factory cell. It would be used to change an environment or produce some useful compound. I can imagine manufacturing them to process chemicals, or create mechanical structures. Put a network address in each one and they can be coordinated. The advantage of not reproducing is that they couldn't mutate if they had no reproduction mechanism at all. Can only come from the factory. Of course they could still be susceptible to viruses."
I've done a little googling since, and mule cells are actually a thing. In organisms they are very common. Neurons are an example. Parts of the immune system. There's also a thing in bacteria where cells divide, creating two daughter cells, one that can reproduce and one that can't. The one that can't makes a support structure around the one that can and then dies. This is how sporulation works.
None of this is deep, dark secret stuff. Some clumsy Wikipedia research got me this deep. If that's dangerous we are in deep sh*t.
(I'm not a biologist, I'm an animator who makes visualizations for university courses.)
They're paranoid about people using AI to synthesise anthrax or something. You also can't ask it how to build a nuclear bomb.
Which shows why guardrails on AI are just dumb. What harm could come from answering your question? None.