Anthropic’s new policy allows Claude to end abusive conversations

Home latest pakistan world sports showbiz entertainment Royal business health Sci-Tech Food Fact Check Sci-Tech Videos shows Watch –> Sci-tech Anthropic’s new policy allows Claude to end abusive conversations AI company says Claude can end interactions involving persistently harmful or abusive user behaviour By AFP | Published October 09, 2026

SAN FRANCISCO: Anthropic has updated its usage policy to prohibit sustained and needless abusive behaviour towards its Claude artificial intelligence system, amid a growing debate over whether AI models can experience consciousness or suffering.

The San Francisco-based company said Claude would retain the ability to end such interactions, making it the primary mechanism for enforcing the new restriction.

“Claude’s ability to end these interactions will remain the primary enforcement mechanism,” the policy states.

The updated policy does not explicitly cite so-called “model welfare”, the idea that AI systems might deserve types of protection usually reserved for living things, but Anthropic and its executives have openly entertained the concept.

Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Last year, the company said it was giving Claude the ability to end conversations in rare, extreme cases of “persistently harmful or abusive user interactions”.

Then in February, CEO Dario Amodei told The New York Times he was unsure whether AI models could be conscious.

“We don’t know if the models are conscious…But we’re open to the idea that it could be,” Amodei said.

Science fiction and popular culture have been fascinated for decades by the boundary between technology and human intelligence, but asking whether AI is conscious may be the wrong question, according to Jackson Stakeman, a general manager at Sparq, an Atlanta-based AI services provider.

“Consciousness is a trap. We can’t prove it in each other. Debate it for AI and you go in circles,” Stakeman told AFP.

“The mirror is a better metaphor. These systems reflect what we put in, at scale. That’s reason enough for the policy change” at Anthropic, he added.

Some have rejected the idea of machine consciousness outright, including Pope Leo XIV and Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman.

“AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer,” Suleyman wrote in an essay last month.

“Granting rights and moral protections to a technological entity, one that looks to be on a path to be seismically more capable and intelligent than us, is a recipe for disaster,” he wrote.

In a sermon delivered in Italian on Thursday at St Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, the pope suggested machines lack a soul, saying they merely “compile data” quickly.

“The mind must not simply compile data — as an algorithm now does more quickly than we can,” the pontiff said.

It must “recall lived experiences, which contain depths of meaning that only the human soul can recognise, and connect more deeply with the goodness of these experiences,” the pope said.