Anthropic has rewritten its usage policy for the first time in more than a year, adding new restrictions on election interference, weapons development, and surveillance. Dario Amodei’s AI giant has raised eyebrows by also adding a policy that will ban users who treat the Claude AI chatbot with “abusive or cruel behavior.”
The Verge reports that the update, published Thursday, is Anthropic’s first revision of the policy in over a year. Among the changes is a new rule prohibiting “sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior” toward Claude. Anthropic said the rule “is meant to apply only in extreme cases, where users repeatedly act cruelly toward our models, with no discernible purpose. It does not apply to common versions of user frustration, pushback, dark creative themes, or model testing and research.”
The cruelty rule builds on a step Anthropic announced last August, when it said Claude could end conversations with “persistently harmful or abusive” users as part of its “model welfare” research. Under the updated policy, cutting off a conversation is still the “primary enforcement mechanism” available. Anthropic did not say whether it plans to add other enforcement tools, such as banning users outright.
The policy also folds what Anthropic called previously “scattered” restrictions into a single ban on deceptive commercial or political campaigns, aimed at “efforts to obscure who is behind a message or amplify content through fake accounts or posts.” A dedicated election section now bans voter deception, efforts to disrupt elections, and misinformation “about candidates or how to vote, impersonating candidates or election officials, or trying to suppress turnout.”
On weapons, Anthropic widened its existing ban to cover “software and components that make weapons work, as well as actions like arming drones and other autonomous vehicles.” The company said it has already seen multiple attempts to use Claude to develop guidance for weapons systems or to control weapons-related software.
Surveillance gets more detail too. Anthropic’s most recent threat intelligence report found growing use of Claude-powered surveillance to track political dissidents. The new policy states plainly: “Tracking people without their consent is prohibited, whether it happens in real time or through analysis of previously collected data.” It goes further on law enforcement uses: “Claude cannot be used to decide or recommend who to investigate, arrest, or charge in a law enforcement or criminal justice process. We also prohibit Claude from being used to build or improve tools designed for surveillance.”
Those rules carry an exception for government work. Anthropic says it may modify them for “contracts with certain governmental customers … if, in Anthropic’s judgment, the contractual use restrictions and applicable safeguards are adequate to mitigate the potential harms.” Anthropic has previously held contracts with the US military.
The policy also adds a new requirement for any Claude deployment “connected to hardware that takes autonomous physical actions and which might be capable of causing injury.” In those cases, a “qualified operator must be able to observe the equipment and stop it if needed,” though it’s unclear whether that operator has to be a person. The addition fits a broader shift among AI companies toward robotics and physical versions of their models.
The cruelty provision arrives after a year in which Anthropic has repeatedly floated the possibility that its models could be conscious. Kyle Fish, who leads the company’s model welfare research, told the Verge in February: “Questions about potential internal experience, consciousness, moral status, and welfare are serious ones that we’re investigating as models become more sophisticated and capable.” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei also addressed the topic in February, speaking on a podcast.
Breitbart News recently reported that Anthropic tried to convince religious leaders that Claude is a conscious being:
For months, Anthropic has quietly hosted dozens of religious scholars from around the world in private meetings, asking them to sign aon-disclosure agreements (NDAs) before discussing the moral and spiritual dimensions of the AI the company is building. The outreach included wisdom circle sessions that began in March as two-day seminars, two larger spring gatherings that included Christian participants, and one multifaith session. Anthropic said the NDAs tied to these meetings were lifted over the summer.
Christopher Olah, 34, one of Anthropic’s seven co-founders, leads the effort. He also heads the team that studies why the company’s AI models, including Claude, behave the way they do. Olah grew up in Toronto in the evangelical culture of the 1990s and has since left Christianity. Before Anthropic he worked at Google and OpenAI, where he developed methods for studying artificial neural networks. Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, said the company had made Olah’s research approach, particularly around language, central to its work. Amodei’s sister, Daniela Amodei, is the company’s president.
Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall reveals in his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI that the worship of artificial intelligence as a literal deity is not science fiction. It is already happening, complete with IRS-registered churches, robot priests, and AI confessionals:
What’s really at stake, Hall argues, is the oldest argument in Western civilization: secular humanism’s belief that mankind is innately good and perfectible through engineering, versus the Judeo-Christian belief in fallen human nature that requires divine redemption, not technological upgrades. “Artificial intelligence is defective in the same way that a natural man is defective,” Hall quotes the pastor and theologian John Piper as saying. “It can rise no higher than the natural, fallen, unregenerate heart of man.” The Reverend Billy Graham agreed: “The real problem, you see, isn’t with computers or the code someone devises to control them. Our real problem is within us—within our own hearts and minds. . . . This is why our greatest need is to have our hearts changed—and that is something only God can do.”
The transhumanist movement, which Hall explores at length in CODE RED , takes the logic further still. In a famed 2004 issue of Foreign Policy on the theme of “the world’s most dangerous ideas,” political scientist Francis Fukuyama singled out transhumanism as the chief menace, warning that its incremental advance makes it appear “downright reasonable” until we start nibbling at “biotechnology’s tempting offerings without realizing that they come at a frightful moral cost.” Former Trump campaign strategist Stephen K. Bannon called it an “immoral Godless technological tsunami that openly declares its intent to transform human beings into a ‘posthuman’ state.”
Read more at the Verge here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.