Models & Labs · United States

Anthropic bans users from being 'cruel' to its AI systems

Credited to BBC · bbc.co.uk · 2h ago

Photograph · BBC

Anthropic has raised eyebrows by announcing it will ban users from "sustained and needless" abusive behaviour towards its AI.

The Claude-maker said on Thursday it was updating its usage policy to let its tools end interactions where people are "cruel" - something it said it had done in "rare" cases prior.

It will now be included on a list of forbidden conduct which also contains bullying others, promoting self-harm and creating non-consensual intimate imagery.

While Anthropic said the policy would only apply in "extreme cases" of repeated abuse, it has reignited debate over how we should communicate with AI tools.

The company said it would not apply to "common versions of user frustration, pushback, dark creative themes, or model testing and research" - suggesting it would only apply in clearly deliberate instances.

But what Anthropic would consider "abusive or cruel behaviour" towards its models remains unclear.

Screenshots of the new policy have been widely shared and commented on across social media - with some praising it as advancing good manners or "model welfare".

But others criticised the plan, with one person calling it " deeply wrong, external " and another suggesting it might undermine abuse directed at humans and animals.

"You can't be cruel to numbers and maths," wrote Dr Barry Scannell, technology partner at Irish law firm William Fry, on LinkedIn, external.

"This level of anthropomorphisation of AI is harmful. It leads people to believe that it's something it's not."

Microsoft AI director Mustafa Suleyman, who in September criticised rival firm Anthropic for treating AI like it is human, reacted to Anthropic's update with a melting face emoji.

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The changes, first reported by tech outlet The Verge, came following an annual review of the usage policy at the firm.

It was also updated to address new or emerging risks in other areas, including by forbidding use of Claude for "deceptive campaigns" or clarifying that, as US midterm elections loom, it cannot be used to "deceive voters or disrupt elections".

Anthropic also said on Thursday its usage policy previously prevented its tools being used to develop weapons.

But none of the updates have attracted as much attention or scrutiny as its move to forbid users abusing its chatbots.

It has also tapped into the much-debated question of whether we should be curt or polite when using generative AI tools.

Some experts say writing or saying "please" or "thank you" to tools like ChatGPT is unnecessary and wastes tokens - used by the large language models powering generative AI tools to process and reply to you.

Others argue politeness can lead to higher quality answers or responses.

When a X user last year asked about electricity costs incurred by ChatGPT replying to users' "please" and "thank you" messages, OpenAI boss Sam Altman said it was, external "tens of millions of dollars well spent - you never know".

The Collins Dictionary meanwhile last November highlighted the re-emergence of the term "clanker" for disparagingly referring to AI tools.

Used to describe robots in Star Wars games and movies since the mid 2000s, the term made its shortlist of words reflecting the mood of 2025 after last July saw many take to TikTok to share their frustrations with AI-powered machines.

Some experts have also posited that being rude to AI chatbots could adversely impact human communication, by seeping into how we talk to and treat others.

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How AI Is Upending the World of Mathematics

Credited to Bloomberg$ · bloomberg.com6h ago

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Last month, OpenAI announced that it had produced an AI-generated proof for the Navier-Stokes problem. LLMs used to be bad at counting, but now they are solving math problems that have stumped humans for decades. Meanwhile, at universities, the problem of AI in education…

View the article · $Bloomberg

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Models & Labs · United States

Claude is turning into an office suite

Credited to TechCentral · techcentral.co.za · 8h ago

Anthropic is building something that looks increasingly like an office suite. On Thursday, the AI company added live data dashboards and animated video explainers to its Claude chatbot, and moved its document, presentation and design tools out of testing and onto every Claude plan, including the free one.

The additions put Anthropic in more direct competition with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace for everyday office work, and with business intelligence tools such as Tableau and Microsoft’s Power BI for data analysis.

They also complicate Anthropic’s relationship with Microsoft, one of its biggest partners. Microsoft already uses Claude models inside Copilot, its own AI assistant, and in March unveiled a Copilot agent tool based on Anthropic’s Claude Cowork product.

The bigger of the two new tools, Claude Dashboards, connects to company data warehouses – Amazon Redshift, BigQuery, ClickHouse, Databricks and Snowflake – and to CRM systems such as Salesforce. Users ask a question in plain language, and Claude writes the database queries, builds the charts and keeps the dashboard current as the underlying data changes.

Each chart shows the query behind it, which Anthropic says lets users check how a figure was produced – a nod to concerns about AI models presenting confident but wrong answers. Dashboards can be exported to analytics tools including Amplitude, Grafana, Hex and Mixpanel, with Looker, monday.com and Tableau support to follow.

Dashboards is in beta on all paid Claude plans. On enterprise plans, it is switched off until an administrator enables it.

Video without the deepfakes

The second tool, Claude Motion, turns prompts into short animated explainers – for example, a quarterly report condensed into a 30-second video for a staff meeting, or an animated chart for a board presentation. Users can edit the result in a built-in editor or by asking Claude for changes, and export it as an MP4 file.

Unlike OpenAI’s Sora or Google’s Veo, Claude Motion does not use a video-generation model. Claude writes code that animates text, charts, shapes and images, so the output contains no generated footage and no AI-generated people. Animations can be opened for further editing in tools from companies including Adobe, Descript, Runway and Luma AI.

Motion is in beta on Anthropic’s Team and Enterprise plans only.

Anthropic has not introduced new prices for the tools. Both count towards each plan’s existing usage limits, and longer animations use more of that allowance.

Claude Docs, Slides and Design, which became generally available on Thursday, gain team collaboration, mobile editing, customer-managed encryption keys and improved export to PowerPoint, PDF and Google Slides.

The launch is the latest move in an increasingly aggressive contest between AI developers for business customers. Anthropic and OpenAI have been battling for enterprise market share, with workplace productivity – rather than consumer chatbots – emerging as a key source of revenue. — (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media, with additional reporting (c) Reuters