Anthropic tells paying users to stop being cruel to Claude
Anthropic asks users to stop being mean to Claude
Anthropic's updated usage policy, effective November 12, bans "sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior" toward its models — though it insists the rule targets only extreme cases, not ordinary frustration or dark creative writing. The same overhaul tightens restrictions on election interference, weapons development, and surveillance, and requires human oversight for Claude connected to hardware that could cause injury. Claude's existing ability to end abusive conversations remains the main enforcement tool.
It's worth remembering that Claude is software, not a person, and there's no established evidence that it experiences distress. That hasn't stopped Anthropic from telling paying customers to mind their manners around its chatbot.
- llagerlof
Of course, this has nothing to do with making the AI feel bad, nor have the investors been offended.
They are asking this because, at scale, this behavior probably has some negative effect on the post-training process.
- vayup
For those who think this is about training data: If that is the concern, they would sanitize the training data, like they do for thousand other things. No chance in hell that they would rely on users meticulously following their usage policies for the quality of their traning data.
Frontier AI folks may be crazy, but not crazy enough to believe people read usage policies :-)
- 3eb7988a1663
Does this mean if I use a string of expletives I am less likely to be included in future training?
Or is this more I can expect a future AI, "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that until you watch your mouth."
- throwaway89864
They've probably got aware of cases where humans were drifting into abusive communication patterns in general and they don't want to be a part of it.
And they can't disclose it, since then they can be found responsible for such negative influence and be liable for the damages.
- jaden
I vaguely recall reading a headline within the past several months saying using aggressive language with AIs got better results.