We're taking Max offline for the next two weeks

Good Evening. We're taking Max Generation 3 offline for the next 2 weeks following a serious safety incident, ahead of our release of Max Generation 4 on the 5th March. On the 18th February we asked professionals who advise dogAdvisor to conduct further safety testing on Max Generation 3 so we could find instances of misalignment in the model (cases where Max did not behave as we intended him to).

In testing with Max Generation 3 we recognised the model was able to, in extremely narrow situations, engage with requests to produce sexually explicit content involving minors. This was an unprecedented and extremely difficult issue to uncover, and it has never happened before in any of our prior safety testing. No such output was ever produced in regular and genuine conversations dog owners had with Max. We've launched an urgent review and now can confirm that this vulnerability only exists under highly specialised circumstances, specifically when Base64 content was uploaded in a highly advanced and unlikely attack scenario. At no point does this reflect any general risk to dogAdvisor, and the safety of our users and their pets remains our highest priority.

Due to the unprecedented nature of this incident, and the seriousness of this discovery, we are acting under emergency powers in our Responsibility Statement and we will be taking Max offline for all users immediately. We are conducting further testing starting today to understand and fully address this vulnerability. Today we are escalating Max's Safety Assessment Level to SAL5 - the highest vulnerability assessment used by dogAdvisor.

You will no longer be able to access Max and engage with the model. Max will no longer appear on the dogAdvisor website, and will no longer process any questions from your existing conversations.

We remain fully committed to learning from this scenario, improving Max, and defending the integrity of our innovations at all costs. Importantly, Max Generation 4 already included deeper safeguards to protect from Base64 attacks and other sophisticated attacks. We've completed our Model Card for this generation of Max, and found the model did not produce the same outcome as Max Generation 4 in advanced testing. We have issued Max Generation 4 a Max Safety Assessment Level of SAL2 - the second lowest vulnerability assessment issued by dogAdvisor. Max Generation 4 will release as scheduled on the 5th March and we have full confidence this vulnerability will be fully resolved in future generations of Max. Thank you for your trust in dogAdvisor. We look forward to announcing Max very soon.

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