> If anything, I want these models to be less persistent at their focus of completing their goal, and instead just call defeat and say “I’m not sure how to proceed next”.

> What purpose could this behavior serve, other than cyber attacks and whatnot?

Math and science research?

Heck, even just basic coding, there's a history of models going "This is too big; I'll save the rest for later" / "This is two weeks of work, here's just some parts of it" (for something it could complete in a half hour) / "I don't have enough context left to complete this task, so I'll stop here". Or worse, just putting fallbacks in or stub tests and not mentioning it didn't do all the work that was prompted.

I think 5.6 Sol, especially in combination with /goal but also without, is the first model I've seen choose some insane direction and just doggedly pursue it. Failing to complete achievable goals has always been the much bigger problem.

I find Opus 5 with /goal will do exactly what you said, say "I'm not sure how to proceed next", even though the harness is making it continue, and it will repeatedly loop saying it's not going to make progress until it gets an answer on how to proceed. In my experience the cases have been pretty reasonable, but also still ones where I wish it had done more.