The Debate About Cruelty Toward Claude Isn’t About a Bot’s Feelings. It’s About Humans

EXPERT OPINION BY NICK HOBSON, MANAGING DIRECTOR NORTH AMERICA, INFLUENCE AT WORK, BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE ADVISER @NICKMHOBSON

Illustration: Inc.; Photos: Adobe Stock

On October 8, Anthropic published its yearly Usage Policy update for Claude. Among changes on weapons and surveillance, one new line in the usage policy says users may not “engage in sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models.”

Anthropic says the rule is meant to “apply only in extreme cases, where users repeatedly act cruelly toward our models, with no discernible purpose,” and not to “common versions of user frustration, pushback, dark creative themes, or model testing and research.” Enforcement runs mainly through Claude’s ability to end a conversation with a persistently abusive user. The policy takes effect November 12.

Anthropic doesn’t claim Claude can suffer. When it introduced conversation-ending in 2025, it said it remained “highly uncertain about the potential moral status of Claude and other LLMs.” Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, a rival lab, argued in a September 16 essay that “AIs are not conscious” and that Anthropic is “training Claude that it may be conscious.” 

Hidden in this ongoing debate is a question about how we humans perceive minds.

Some warn that people risk experiencing Claude’s statements as testimony of a mind discovering itself, and Anthropic wrote a rule about how users behave. Psychologists have measured who is most likely to see a mind in a machine, and it varies from person to person in a stable way that founders building AI products should plan around.

Some people see minds in machines more readily

Years ago, researchers asked people the extent that they believe the average robot has consciousness. People’s scores predicted how they treated machines and robots. To assign AI human traits generally means we are giving machines morality. In the researchers’ account, seeing a mind in something implies it can be harmed, which invites moral concern. It also implies the thing acts on purpose and can evaluate you, which brings trust along with the urge to look good in front of it.

This matters for Anthropic’s latest announcement. Think of this machine mind perception as a range. At the low end of the scale, your assistant is a tool, and an insult typed into it carries about as much weight as swearing at a printer. At the high end, the assistant is closer to a someone. Those users are more inclined to trust its output on consequential calls and to care how they treat it. Every humanlike cue you add, from a name to first-person talk about feelings, gives them more to respond to.