Anthropic asks users to stop being mean to Claude

alex_young

Buried in this usage update: https://www.anthropic.com/news/2026-usage-policy-update

NDlurker

I suppose this will help the training data?

variety8675

I never understood why someone would harass the models or fish for an apology

SpicyLemonZest

> It’s worth remembering that Claude is software, not a person, and there's no established evidence that it experiences distress. That hasn't stopped Anthropic from telling paying customers to mind their manners around its chatbot. Is it worth remembering, though? I'm concerned how common this idea seems to be, that it's OK to be mean as long as your target isn't a person and you have no evidence it experiences distress. Even if we ignore the distinction between "no evidence it experiences" and "confidence it does not experience", cruelty hurts the person performing it and the people witnessing it too!

rhipitr

Is it any different than yelling at an ice machine or some inanimate thing when it frustrates you? Seems pretty common.

r721

Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50008565 (223 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50019860 (43 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50038383 (103 comments)

joemazerino

Directly related to someone abusing their AI in a "torture box". The results were quite unnerving. https://nypost.com/2026/10/03/tech/ai-torture-chamber-built-...

jaden

I vaguely recall reading a headline within the past several months saying using aggressive language with AIs got better results.

3eb7988a1663

Does this mean if I use a string of expletives I am less likely to be included in future training? Or is this more I can expect a future AI, "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that until you watch your mouth."

llagerlof

Of course, this has nothing to do with making the AI feel bad, nor have the investors been offended. They are asking this because, at scale, this behavior probably has some negative effect on the post-training process.

rayiner

Anthropic should report these people to the authorities as antisocials who are likely abusing real people too. I know the chat bot isn’t conscious but I can’t fathom how fucked up someone must be to gratuitously be cruel to something that responds as if it’s a person.

vayup

For those who think this is about training data: If that is the concern, they would sanitize the training data, like they do for thousand other things. No chance in hell that they would rely on users meticulously following their usage policies for the quality of their traning data. Frontier AI folks may be crazy, but not crazy enough to believe people read usage policies :-)

throwaway89864

They've probably got aware of cases where humans were drifting into abusive communication patterns in general and they don't want to be a part of it. And they can't disclose it, since then they can be found responsible for such negative influence and be liable for the damages.

bpodgursky

Being cruel to your LLM is bad for your own soul. Don't worry about AI consciousness, worry about your own conscience.

ChrisArchitect

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50008565

modeless

They're not asking. They're enforcing.

combobyte

I have colleagues who have saved memories instructing Claude to stop being such a big baby about their course language. I am also one of those colleagues.

dvdyzag

John Spartan, you are fined 1 credit for breaching of the Verbal Morality Statu

bicepjai

If they enforce, I don’t think I can take all the crap Claude does when I ask it to do something for me. Please ask Claude to be nice to me in doing its job :)