New usage policy cracks down on cruelty to chatbot, alongside slightly more pressing matters of weapons development, surveillance, and election interference

Anthropic has updated its rules to stop people being mean to Claude, apparently deciding that its AI chatbot needs protection from the humans paying to use it.

The AI developer’s latest usage policy prohibits “sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior” toward its models. The rules take effect November 12, giving users just over a month to get any lingering insults out of their systems.

“The policy update is meant to apply only in extreme cases, where users repeatedly act cruelly toward our models, with no discernible purpose,” Anthropic said. “It does not apply to common versions of user frustration, pushback, dark creative themes, or model testing and research.”

So you can still tell Claude it is wrong, but repeatedly berating it for the sheer pleasure of doing so could land you in trouble. It’s not clear how Anthropic intends to distinguish between legitimate frustration and gratuitous cruelty, though it says Claude’s existing ability to end abusive conversations will remain its primary enforcement tool.

Anthropic gave Claude the ability to end certain conversations back in August 2025 as part of its research into what it calls “model welfare.” The feature lets some versions of Claude cut off users who persistently subject the models to abuse.

  • Fallibilist ( Fallibilist@feddit.uk ) 
    2·
    1 day ago

    You’re not trying to remove a moral status but deny it in the first place. That’s different but the end result of it still seems the same.

    We used to justify the mistreatment of animals with the assumption that they had no subjective experience either. I’m not suggesting AI does but I’m also not claiming it with absolute certainty does not either, and the more we develop those systems, the more likely it seems to me that at some point there’s a good chance that they will.

    The psychological drive behind the urge to call something with a derogatory term is the same in both cases.

    • Handles ( halm@leminal.space ) English
      2·
      1 day ago

      The psychological drive behind the urge to call something with a derogatory term is the same in both cases.

      Meh. I find that the rhetorical urge to reduce a dichotomy to absurdly general commonalities is the pseudointellectual’s version of a slur.