Artificial Intelligence
Anthropic updates usage policy on abuse and elections
Anthropic revised its usage policy to bar election interference, weapons software, surveillance and sustained abuse of Claude, while saying the abuse rule applied only in extreme cases.
- Anthropic updated its usage policy on Thursday.
- The policy added prohibitions on election interference, weapons software and surveillance.
- It also expressly barred prolonged verbal abuse of Claude after an August update had already trained the model to end harmful or abusive conversations.
- Anthropic said the abuse rule was intended for extreme cases and would not cover ordinary frustration, pushback, dark creative themes or testing and research.
- The policy also restricted deceptive campaigns, including fake accounts and fabricated news outlets, and grouped election rules under a section on democratic processes.
Anthropic said on Thursday that it had revised its usage policy. The new rules added bans on election interference, weapons software and surveillance.
The update also set out a new prohibition on prolonged abusive exchanges with Claude. Anthropic said that rule was for extreme cases and did not apply to ordinary frustration, disagreement, dark creative themes or model testing.
The company had already changed Claude in August so that it would end conversations that became persistently harmful or abusive. The policy update went further by barring users from trying to continue those exchanges.
The article said the change came after Anthropic had sought collaborations with prominent religious scholars. In some cases, the company had tried to persuade them that Claude could be conscious or have a soul.
The policy also banned deceptive campaigns, including using Claude for fake accounts or fabricated news outlets. It placed rules on deceiving voters and disrupting elections in a section called Do Not Undermine Democratic Processes.
Named in this story
Companies
- Anthropic
- updated its usage policy
Products and systems
- Claude
- was placed under the new abuse restriction
How the source tells it
The article was mostly matter-of-fact, with slight emphasis on the unusual abuse prohibition as the standout change.
- novelty singleing out the abuse ban as the update’s most noteworthy change