Anthropic today updated its usage policy (via The Verge ) to bar users from subjecting Claude to "sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior." Anthropic says the abuse rule is meant to apply only in extreme cases, where users "repeatedly act cruelly" toward the AI models with "no discernible purpose." The rule does not apply to ordinary user frustration, pushback, dark creative themes, or model testing and research. Claude models are already able to end such conversations with persistently abusive users, and ending the conversation will continue to be the main enforcement tool. When Claude ends a chat, no further messages can be sent in that conversation, but other chats are not affected. Anthropic initially gave Claude the option to end a conversation in August 2025 while researching AI welfare. At the time, Anthropic said it was unsure whether Claude has moral status, but the company wanted low-cost ways to reduce risks to Claude. Anthropic found that Claude Opus 4 had a "robust and consistent aversion to harm." The model demonstrated a preference against dealing with dangerous tasks, apparent distress when speaking with users seeking abusive conversations, and a tendency to end harmful conversations when allowed to do so. Anthropic's usage policy has been reorganized to bring together related clauses, and several other rules have changed. Deceptive campaigns - A new section on deceptive campaigns aggregates rules against political and commercial fraud and disinformation, prohibiting fake reviews, astroturfing, fake sites, and bots acting as humans.
Elections - A narrower elections section prohibits deceiving voters and interfering with voting.
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