The well-known artificial intelligence company Anthropic recently revised its policies for the AI assistant Claude. The new regulations will come into effect on November 12, 2026. One of the most notable changes in this revision is the inclusion of a clear restriction in the terms that prohibits “continuous and unnecessary abuse or cruel behavior.”
According to official instructions, this rule mainly applies to users who treat the model cruelly without a clear purpose and repeatedly. Regarding the specific implementation mechanism, Anthropic stated that the current approach is to terminate the conversation, but it has not been clarified whether further penalties such as account bans will be introduced in the future. At the same time, the company emphasized that this clause does not apply to users' daily complaints, doubts, literary works containing dark themes, and compliant model security testing and research.
In addition to standardizing human-computer interaction behavior, Anthropic also expanded and refined the bans in several core areas:
Weapon ban upgrade: The scope of the weapons-related ban has been further expanded, explicitly including software and components that enable the operation of weapons, as well as the development of armed drones and other autonomous vehicles. Anthropic revealed that several attempts to use Claude to develop weapon guidance or control software have been identified previously.
Enhanced monitoring restrictions: The monitoring provisions explicitly prohibit unauthorized tracking of individuals, whether real-time tracking or analyzing existing data. It is also strictly forbidden to use Claude to decide or recommend targets for investigation, arrest, or prosecution in law enforcement and criminal justice proceedings, as well as to build or improve any monitoring tools.
Physical hardware security: It is stipulated that when AI is connected to autonomous physical hardware that may cause harm to the outside world, qualified operators must be present on site for observation, and the device should be able to stop operating at any time if necessary. However, for specific government clients, Anthropic states that relevant rules can be flexibly adjusted provided that contractual restrictions and safety measures are in place.