Anthropic has introduced new capabilities that can permit a few of its latest, largest fashions to finish conversations in what the corporate describes as “uncommon, excessive circumstances of persistently dangerous or abusive person interactions.” Strikingly, Anthropic says it’s doing this to not defend the human person, however relatively the AI mannequin itself.
To be clear, the corporate isn’t claiming that its Claude AI fashions are sentient or will be harmed by their conversations with customers. In its personal phrases, Anthropic stays “extremely unsure concerning the potential ethical standing of Claude and different LLMs, now or sooner or later.”
Nevertheless, its announcement factors to a current program created to check what it calls “mannequin welfare” and says Anthropic is basically taking a just-in-case method, “working to determine and implement low-cost interventions to mitigate dangers to mannequin welfare, in case such welfare is feasible.”
This newest change is at the moment restricted to Claude Opus 4 and 4.1. And once more, it’s solely purported to occur in “excessive edge circumstances,” resembling “requests from customers for sexual content material involving minors and makes an attempt to solicit data that may allow large-scale violence or acts of terror.”
Whereas these forms of requests might doubtlessly create authorized or publicity issues for Anthropic itself (witness current reporting round how ChatGPT can doubtlessly reinforce or contribute to its customers’ delusional pondering), the corporate says that in pre-deployment testing, Claude Opus 4 confirmed a “robust desire towards” responding to those requests and a “sample of obvious misery” when it did so.
As for these new conversation-ending capabilities, the corporate says, “In all circumstances, Claude is simply to make use of its conversation-ending capability as a final resort when a number of makes an attempt at redirection have failed and hope of a productive interplay has been exhausted, or when a person explicitly asks Claude to finish a chat.”
Anthropic additionally says Claude has been “directed to not use this capability in circumstances the place customers could be at imminent threat of harming themselves or others.”
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When Claude does finish a dialog, Anthropic says customers will nonetheless be capable of begin new conversations from the identical account, and to create new branches of the troublesome dialog by enhancing their responses.
“We’re treating this function as an ongoing experiment and can proceed refining our method,” the corporate says.
