Anthropic wants users to be nicer to Claude. Here's what smart people are saying about its move to ban abusive behavior.

• Anthropic will begin treating sustained, needless abuse of Claude as a policy violation.
• Some say the rule could train safer AI; others say it blurs the line between machines and people.
• “Granting them human-like empathy is one of the most dangerous things we could do,” one tech CEO said.

“Strikes me this implies the company is certainly using customer’s prompts as part of the training data?” Gurley wrote on X on Thursday.

“Otherwise, why would it matter? There would be no impact to the larger system.”

Anthropic’s policy does not say abusive prompts are prohibited because they are used in training data. It says the rule is part of a broader set of standards intended to prevent harm and promote responsible use.

Scott Stevenson, tech executive

Spellbook’s CEO, Scott Stevenson, called the policy a “dangerous precedent,” arguing that there is no reason to think today’s models are conscious.

“Granting them human-like empathy is one of the most dangerous things we could do,” he wrote on X on Thursday. “It increases their power to manipulate humans dramatically.”

Stevenson argued in a thread that AI’s ability to produce art, philosophy, and software does not establish consciousness.

His view was challenged by others who said the absence of an agreed-upon definition of consciousness makes it difficult to confidently rule it out.

Joseph Carlson, founder and YouTube host

Joseph Carlson, founder of Qualtrim and host of “The Joseph Carlson Show” on YouTube, said he had never been cruel to an AI model, but found Anthropic’s policy “very odd.”

He said that Claude has no feelings, moral agency, or sentience — and that treating abusive prompts as a harm to the model may confuse users about what AI actually is.

“Being rude to Claude is like being rude to a chair, or a desk,” Carlson wrote on X on Thursday.

“The more we treat AI like humans, the more people are going to be confused about what’s real and not real,” he added.

Mark Verner, investor

Mark Verner, CEO and founder of Hong Kong-based Apollo Capital Management, focused on the policy’s potential reach.

“First, AI companies decide what you can generate,” he wrote in an X post on Friday. “Now they may decide how you are allowed to speak to their models.”

He wondered whether asking Claude what product could replace it would count as abusive behavior — a question that underscores how much will depend on Anthropic’s interpretation and enforcement of the word “needless.”

Anthropic says it may warn users or throttle, limit, suspend, or terminate access if it suspects a policy violation.

Lachlan Phillips, entrepreneur

Lachlan Phillips, founder and director of LiveMind AI, said that Anthropic should use product design rather than account penalties to deal with hostile users.

“Shouldn’t they just train Claude to not engage and do the task it was asked to do?” he wrote in an X post on Friday.

Phillips suggested that abusive messages could be filtered through a system that reinterprets them as ordinary requests. He said the rule was less about protecting Claude than imposing a worldview on users.

“This isn’t about ‘model welfare,'” he wrote. “This is about EA thinking they’re going to fix you.”