---
title: Anthropic bans ‘abusive or cruel behavior’ toward Claude
bookmark_of: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/1008100/anthropic-new-usage-policy-abuse-claude
date: 2026-10-14T09:32:00.000Z
published: true
tags:
  - ai
syndication:
  - all
notify: true
slug: ''
---

From the Verge:

>Anthropic is making changes to its usage policy for the first time in over a year to reflect new and high-risk cases of misuse — including election interference, weapons development, surveillance, and health and financial uses. But one of the most significant changes prohibits “sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior” toward Claude.

>Last August, the company [announced](https://www.anthropic.com/research/end-subset-conversations) it would allow Claude to end conversations with “persistently harmful or abusive” users as part of its research into “model welfare.” The new update says that terminating conversations is still the “primary enforcement mechanism”; Anthropic did not provide a comment on whether there would be further enforcement mechanisms, such as potential user bans. Anthropic wrote that the new policy update “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 company doesn't seem to have suggested _why_ they're enforcing this, but to my mind, there are two reasons: to prevent training on data that is overly antagonistic and abusive, or Anthropic thinks their AI is sentient and feeling. Optically, I could understand Anthropic hoping to illicit the latter, but my guess is the rationale is the really based on the former.

[Musk voice his support for Anthropic's decision](https://cybernews.com/ai-news/elon-musk-anthropic-ai-welfare/), stating "I think this is the right move. Cruelty to something that believes it is experiencing pain is not ok." Given that Grok can be rather unhinged, I'm not sure I believe that Musk would curtail the same abuse on his platform.