10 October 2026

Anthropic adds a rule against sustained cruelty toward its Claude chatbot

First reported

CNET, TechRadar and 1 other ran this on 9 October, a day before the next source picked it up.

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, updated its usage policy to bar repeated, needless cruelty toward its AI models.
The rule applies only to extreme cases with no discernible purpose, and ordinary frustration or dark creative themes remain allowed.
In last-resort cases Claude can end the conversation, a step Anthropic first introduced in August 2025.

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