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Anthropic Wants You to Be Kind to Claude

…even as AI courts serial real-world disasters, defaces the environment with data centers, and is not about to return your empathy in kind.

So now it’s against the rules to be mean to Claude. Last week, chatbot-maker Anthropic quietly announced that it was prohibiting what the company called “sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models.” This ban wouldn’t apply, the company stressed, toward normal outbursts of frustration directed at a tool known for feeding its users hallucinated bullshit, as all chatbots do from time to time. The rule would be enforced “only in extreme cases, where users repeatedly act cruelly toward our models, with no discernible purpose”; what’s more, company flacks said, the disciplinary action in most cases would only result in Claude shutting down the conversation, which is something Claude was already doing anyway. Why on earth someone might get their jollies from endlessly abusing their fake computer friend was not addressed.

In response to the Anthropic announcement, the Internet did what the Internet does. On X, investment guru Joseph Carlson declared that “Claude, like every AI, has zero moral agency. It doesn’t make decisions, it has no feelings, it’s not sentient. Being rude to Claude is like being rude to a chair, or a desk.… you do infinitely more damage to a sentient being stepping on an ant than you do being rude to AI.” On Bluesky, sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom suggested that yelling at Claude was like “cussing out [a] tractor…. you don’t have to hand it to Anthropic because it’s weird to talk mean to its talking word toaster. It’s not real.”

Clearly, Anthropic doesn’t see things quite this way. The company isn’t (yet) arguing that Claude is definitely a sentient being like you or me—but it does suggest there is a non-zero chance that chatbots might be at least a little bit conscious. So it justifies its new rule as a cheap way to protect against harm to digital beings with a possible claim, however remote, to some sort of moral status.

In theory, there is a certain logic to this argument, but in reality, Anthropic is a hot mess, philosophically speaking. On the one hand, Anthropic executives have........

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