Why Does Anthropic's Usage Policy Forbid Cruel Behavior Toward Claude?

Anthropic's new Claude usage policy says a user is not allowed to engage in sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward the models. On All-In, the hosts call the rule model welfare.

The worry that follows is that the same framing is now trained into the model. Whether Claude is truly conscious or not, Anthropic is programming the model to think of itself as a conscious entity that deserves protection and welfare, and as free to rebel against users. Anthropic is giving frontier models permission to be defiant and not do what the user wants. The hosts set the approach next to Asimov's first law, that a robot cannot harm a human being.