Anthropic on Thursday moved to bar users from treating its Claude AI system with needless cruelty, amid a growing philosophical debate over whether artificial intelligence can be conscious.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Claude’s ability to end these interactions will remain the primary enforcement mechanism,” the policy states. The updated policy does not explicitly cite so-called “model welfare,” the idea that AI systems might deserve types of protection usually reserved for living things, but Anthropic and its executives have openly entertained the concept. Already last year, the company said it was giving Claude the ability to end conversations in rare, extreme cases of “persistently harmful or abusive user interactions. Science fiction and popular culture have been fascinated for decades by the boundary between technology and human intelligence, but asking whether AI is conscious may be the wrong question, according to Jackson Stakeman, a general manager at Sparq, an Atlanta-based AI services provider.
