Anthropic bans abuse of 'Claude'... prohibits users from continuously mistreating it

Anthropic announced that it will ban users from engaging in any “abusive or cruel behavior that is persistent and unjustified” toward its AI model Claude, according to the French Press Agency. The policy will take effect on November 12 and will target extreme cases “in which users repeatedly treat the models with cruelty without a clear purpose,” the company wrote in an update to its terms of use. It added that the policy would not cover ordinary harassment, differences of opinion, writing fictional violent or dark stories, or conducting tests and research on the models. The US-based company linked this decision to a feature it launched in August 2025, which allows Claude to independently end a conversation with a user who persistently engages in abusive behavior. At the time, the company said the feature was the result of “its exploratory research into the psychological safety that AI systems may possess.” Anthropic has sparked widespread debate by explicitly addressing the possibility that its models possess some form of consciousness.