Anthropic bans ‘abusive or cruel behavior’ toward Claude

Anthropic is deeply worried that you plebs don’t appreciate that Claude AI is actually a little guy inside the machine. You just don’t treat our beautiful son Claude with respect! So Anthropic’s put a new rule into its terms of service: [Anthropic] We’ve added a prohibition on sustained and…

Anthropic is deeply worried that you plebs don’t appreciate that Claude AI is actually a little guy inside the machine. You just don’t treat our beautiful son Claude with respect! So Anthropic’s put a new rule into its terms of service: [Anthropic] We’ve added a prohibition on sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models. The 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. Anthropic has not clarified what it counts as “abusive”. Does yelling at Claude-backed Copilot when it messes up your work again count if you do it twice? You need to be more Mean Girls in your bot-bullying. Oh, that’s a lovely prompt you brought today, Claude, I’d have thought Dario could afford something better for you. If he loved you. But it’s nice. Really. This new rule looks like Anthropic promoting its bots as being genuine intelligences — the little guy theory of AI. Chris Olah from Anthropic is thoroughly convinced the chatbot is a little guy, and even thought he could lobby the pope to agree with him. And was shocked when the pope did not. Here’s another quote from that New York Times article about Chris Olah getting religious scholars in to try to get them to go along with this dumb idea: [NYT, archive] At the dinner table with Mr. Olah, Rabbi Navon argued that if Anthropic was right and Claude were conscious, then the company was creating slaves, because it was making conscious entities work for free. Rabbi Navon said that he personally was not troubled by the slavery issue because he did not believe the machine was conscious, but that Mr. Olah was troubled. “I think you should be fighting the South and freeing the slaves,” Rabbi Navon said he told Mr. Olah that night. Afterward the rabbi sent Mr. Olah some of his writings, arguing that building conscious machines should be banned. The catch is that AI bros don’t want to treat their customers like people. Like all the AI companies, Anthropic uses every attention loop trick it can to keep you clicking, like a gambling addiction. I suggest a new rule for AI companies: bar them from treating their customers and their employees abusively. This “don’t bully the bot” rule is to distract from what they do. Video — Podcast

Source: Pivot to AI — Published October 9, 2026 at 20:23 UTC — Category: Business