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.
\n\nThe San Francisco-based AI lab updated its usage policy to include "a prohibition on sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models."
\n\n"Claude's ability to end these interactions will remain the primary enforcement mechanism," the policy states.
\n\nThe 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.
\n\nAnthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
\n\nAlready 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."
\n\nThen in February, CEO Dario Amodei told The New York Times he was unsure whether AI models could be conscious.
\n\n"We don't know if the models are conscious…But we're open to the idea that it could be," Amodei said.
\n\nScience fiction and popular culture have been fascinated for decades by the boundary between technology and human intelligence, but asking whether AI is…
Original source: https://www.cnbctv18.com/technology/
