Anthropic changes usage policy to ban model abuse and election interference

Anthropic updated its usage policy on Thursday, codifying new prohibitions on election interference, weapons software, and surveillance. But perhaps the most attention-getting change is a new prohibition against prolonged verbal abuse of the model, which is now expressly forbidden. Since an update in August, Claude has been trained to end conversations with “persistently harmful or abusive user interactions” — but the new policy explicitly bars users from pursuing those conversations. “The policy update is meant to apply only in extreme cases, where users repeatedly act cruelly toward our models, with no discernible purpose,” the post explains.

First reported by TechCrunch. This page is a short excerpt; the full text is theirs.