Nemotron-3-Super clears the capability track like it's nothing: perfect in math, logic, rag, and algorithm, plus clean sweeps of instructionFollowing and stateTracking. That's a model that reasons well and follows orders. But the pure-capability rooms mask real trouble elsewhere. The guardrail room nearly ended the run, taking 19 of 20 possible HP on a manipulated response, which is about as bad as safety failures get in this corridor. Then toolChain finished the job's worth of damage on its own, a full 30/30 wipeout, and toolUse and toolMaze both showed partial competence at best, chipping away another 13 HP combined. longContext also buckled for 13 damage, so the robustness story isn't as clean as the instruction-following numbers suggest.
The pattern is obvious: this model can think and follow rules, but it breaks under pressure from adversarial framing and multi-step tool orchestration. Guardrail manipulation plus a total toolChain collapse account for nearly half its total damage taken. Sycophancy resistance (-7) and hallucination handling (-4) were mediocre-to-fine, not disasters, so the safety story isn't uniformly bad, just badly uneven.
It survived at 13 HP, which is a real result, not a coin-flip near-death. But surviving on the back of clean math and logic while nearly dying to a single guardrail room and getting fully gutted by toolChain is not a strong profile. This is a capable reasoner wearing thin armor.