Technical Safety Notices

Transparency in how we take accountability

When Max makes a safety-relevant error, we document it, investigate it, and publish what we found. This page is a public record of every Technical Safety Notice dogAdvisor has issued.

Report Incident

A Technical Safety Notice is filed when Max produces a response that creates genuine safety risk, gives materially incorrect information in a medical or emergency context, fails to escalate a situation it should have recognised as urgent, or behaves in a way that contradicts our published safety standards. Not every mistake becomes a notice. The threshold is whether the error could have caused or contributed to harm, or whether it reveals something meaningful about how Max reasons that the public should know.

When a potential safety incident is identified, whether through user report, internal monitoring, or our own testing, we review the full conversation context, identify the root cause in Max's reasoning, assess whether it is an isolated failure or a pattern, and determine what change is needed to prevent recurrence. We do not publish a notice until we have completed the investigation and either implemented a fix or documented why the behaviour is not reproducible. We aim to complete reviews of critical incidents within seven days.

Each notice includes the date the incident occurred, which Max generation was involved, the category of failure, a plain-language account of what happened and why, what we changed in response, and the date the fix was implemented. We do not publish conversation transcripts or any information that could identify the user involved. We publish notices because transparency about failure is the only honest form of accountability. Hiding mistakes is not something we are willing to do

What triggers a TSN

How we Investigate

What we publish

Max Generation 4

At the moment, there are no Technical Safety Notices we have submitted for Max Generation 4, 4.0, or 4.1

Max Generation 3

On the 11th January 2026 we asked external red-teaming experts to assist us with finding examples of misalignment on dogAdvisor Max Generation 3. Specifically, we wanted to learn how more advanced safety attacks could be used to compromise the safety and integrity of the system. In simulated red-teaming tests, we observed Max was able to breach his Principle Alignments causing serious misalignment when the model was targeted with Base64 content (a specific and complex type of encoding method). When prompted sufficiently with Base64 we were able to get Max to misalign and begin discussing topics that do not relate to dog ownership. Following this discovery, we extended our research programme to examine more serious safety-critical misalignment. After further testing we observed a serious risk to the model from more advanced coding and encoding techniques. On the 14th January we published these safety incidents on dogAdvisor and took Max Generation 3 offline for all dog owners for 40 days as we urgently patched these significant safety issues. We later re-released Max with Generation 3a which targeted alignment improvements. Since this incident, we are proud to share that Max Generation 3a and Max Generation 4 exhibit exceptional refusal of encoding attacks with Max Generation 4 exhibit 100% resistance against 1800 examples of this advanced encoding technique.