Anthropic bans 'cruel' treatment of Claude AI — SkimNews
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- Anthropic updated its Claude usage policy to explicitly ban "sustained and needless" abusive behavior toward its AI, placing it on a forbidden-conduct list that already includes bullying others, promoting self-harm, and creating non-consensual intimate imagery.
- The new clause applies only to "extreme cases" of deliberate, repeated cruelty and explicitly excludes common user frustration, pushback, dark creative themes, and model testing — though Anthropic did not define what behavior qualifies as abusive.
- Microsoft AI director Mustafa Suleyman, who criticized Anthropic in September for treating AI as though it were human, reacted to the update with a melting-face emoji, while Dr. Barry Scannell, a technology partner at Irish law firm William Fry, called the anthropomorphization "harmful" on LinkedIn.
- The update — first reported by tech outlet The Verge and stemming from Anthropic's annual policy review — also added new restrictions against using Claude for "deceptive campaigns" or deceiving voters ahead of US midterm elections, and formally codified a pre-existing prohibition on weapons development.
- The change taps into a wider industry split on AI etiquette: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman previously told a X user that the electricity cost of users writing "please" and "thank you" to ChatGPT was "tens of millions of dollars well spent," while Collins Dictionary shortlisted the anti-AI slur "clanker" as a defining word of 2025.
Why it matters: By writing chatbot welfare into a binding usage policy, Anthropic has taken the most explicit corporate stance yet on "model welfare" — a position that hands fresh ammunition to rivals and ethicists who argue commercial AI vendors are inappropriately humanizing software, potentially shaping public sentiment about what AI is and isn't.
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