Explain the execution flow of Claude Sonnet 5's cyber safeguards during a request?

As a request comes in, before or alongside normal processing, Sonnet 5's real-time cyber safeguards evaluate whether the content involves dangerous cybersecurity-related usage - this runs as part of the model's default behavior rather than as an opt-in feature a developer has to separately enable.

If the safeguards determine the request falls into a flagged category of dangerous cyber usage, the request can be refused at that point, even if a similarly-shaped prompt would have been processed normally on Sonnet 4.6, since these safeguards are new to this release and specifically tuned for cyber-related risk.

If the request doesn't trigger the safeguards, processing continues through the model's normal reasoning and response pipeline as usual, with the safeguard check functioning as an additional layer rather than replacing or altering the model's standard reasoning and generation process for non-flagged requests.

Because Anthropic has stated Sonnet 5 wasn't deliberately trained for cybersecurity capability and has a much lower ability to perform dangerous cyber operations than current Opus-class models, these safeguards function as a defensive control layered onto a model that isn't itself optimized for that domain, rather than a capability constraint on an otherwise cyber-capable model.

flowchart TD
  A[Request received] --> B{Cyber safeguard check}
  B -- Flagged as dangerous cyber usage --> C[Request refused]
  B -- Not flagged --> D[Normal reasoning and response pipeline]