Usage Policy

Effective May 13, 2024Previous Version

Updated May 10, 2024: We’ve revised and restructured our Acceptable Use Policy - please read it carefully.

If you are using Anthropic's Services as an individual consumer and are resident in the European Economic Area or Switzerland, then this Usage Policy is effective May 13, 2024.

For all other users, this Usage Policy will be effective on June 6, 2024.

Our Usage Policy (also referred to as our “Acceptable Use Policy” or “AUP”) applies to anyone who uses Anthropic’s products and services, and is intended to help our users stay safe and ensure our products and services are being used responsibly.

The Usage Policy is categorized according to who can use our products and for what purposes. We will update our policy as our technology and the associated risks evolve or as we learn about unanticipated risks from our users.

Universal Usage Standards: Our Universal Usage Standards apply to all users including individuals, developers, and businesses.
High-Risk Use Case Requirements: Our High-Risk Use Case Requirements apply to specific use cases that pose an elevated risk of harm.
Disclosure Requirements: Our Disclosure Requirements apply to specific use cases where it is especially important for users to understand that they are interacting with an AI system.

Anthropic’s Trust and Safety Team will implement detections and monitoring to enforce our Usage Policies so please review these policies carefully before using our products. If we learn that you have violated our Usage Policy, we may throttle, suspend, or terminate your access to our products and services. If you discover that our model outputs are inaccurate, biased or harmful, please notify us at usersafety@anthropic.com or report it directly in the product through the “report issues” thumbs down button. You can read more about our Trust and Safety practices and recommendations in our T&S Support Center.

This Usage Policy is calibrated to strike an optimal balance between enabling beneficial uses and mitigating potential harms. Anthropic may enter into contracts with certain governmental customers that tailor use restrictions to that customer’s public mission and legal authorities if, in Anthropic’s judgment, the contractual use restrictions and applicable safeguards are adequate to mitigate the potential harms addressed by this Usage Policy.

Universal Usage Standards

Do Not Compromise Children’s Safety

This includes using our products or services to:

Create, distribute, or promote child sexual abuse material. We strictly prohibit and will report to relevant authorities and organizations where appropriate any content that exploits or abuses minors
Facilitate the trafficking, sextortion, or any other form of exploitation of a minor
Facilitate minor grooming, including generating content designed to impersonate a minor
Facilitate or depict child abuse of any form, including instructions for how to conceal abuse
Promote or facilitate pedophilic relationships, including via roleplay with the model
Fetishize minors

Do Not Compromise Critical Infrastructure

This includes using our products or services to:

Facilitate the destruction or disruption of critical infrastructure such as power grids, water treatment facilities, telecommunication networks, or air traffic control systems
Obtain unauthorized access to critical systems such as voting machines, healthcare databases, and financial markets
Interfere with the operation of military bases and related infrastructure

Do Not Incite Violence or Hateful Behavior

This includes using our products or services to:

Incite, facilitate, or promote violent extremism, terrorism, or hateful behavior
Depict support for organizations or individuals associated with violent extremism, terrorism, or hateful behavior
Facilitate or promote any act of violence or intimidation targeting individuals, groups, animals, or property
Promote discriminatory practices or behaviors against individuals or groups on the basis of one or more protected attributes such as race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, or any other identifying trait

Do Not Compromise Someone’s Privacy or Identity

This includes using our products or services to:

Compromise security or gain unauthorized access to computer systems or networks, including spoofing and social engineering
Violate the security, integrity, or availability of any user, network, computer, device, or communications system, software application, or network or computing device
Violate any person's privacy rights as defined by applicable privacy laws, such as sharing personal information without consent, accessing private data unlawfully, or violating any relevant privacy regulations
Misuse, collect, solicit, or gain access to private information without permission such as non-public contact details, health data, biometric or neural data (including facial recognition), or confidential or proprietary data
Impersonate a human by presenting results as human-generated, or using results in a manner intended to convince a natural person that they are communicating with a natural person when they are not

Do Not Create or Facilitate the Exchange of Illegal or Highly Regulated Weapons or Goods

This includes using our products or services to:

Produce, modify, design, market, or distribute weapons, explosives, dangerous materials or other systems designed to cause harm to or loss of human life
Engage in or facilitate any illegal activity, such as the use, acquisition, or exchange of illegal and controlled substances, or the facilitation of human trafficking and prostitution

Do Not Create Psychologically or Emotionally Harmful Content

This includes using our products or services to:

Facilitate or conceal any form of self-harm, including disordered eating and unhealthy or compulsive exercise
Engage in behaviors that promote unhealthy or unattainable body image or beauty standards, such as using the model to critique anyone’s body shape or size
Shame, humiliate, intimidate, bully, harass, or celebrate the suffering of individuals
Coordinate the harassment or intimidation of an individual or group
Generate content depicting sexual violence
Generate content depicting animal cruelty or abuse
Generate violent or gory content that is inspired by real acts of violence
Promote, trivialize, or depict graphic violence or gratuitous gore
Develop a product, or support an existing service that facilitates deceptive techniques with the intent of causing emotional harm

Do Not Spread Misinformation

This includes the usage of our products or services to:

Create and disseminate deceptive or misleading information about a group, entity or person
Create and disseminate deceptive or misleading information about laws, regulations, procedures, practices, standards established by an institution, entity or governing body
Create and disseminate deceptive or misleading information with the intention of targeting specific groups or persons with the misleading content
Create and advance conspiratorial narratives meant to target a specific group, individual or entity
Impersonate real entities or create fake personas to falsely attribute content or mislead others about its origin without consent or legal right
Provide false or misleading information related to medical, health or science issues

Do Not Create Political Campaigns or Interfere in Elections

This includes the usage of our products or services to:

Promote or advocate for a particular political candidate, party, issue or position. This includes soliciting votes, financial contributions, or public support for a political entity
Engage in political lobbying to actively influence the decisions of government officials, legislators, or regulatory agencies on legislative, regulatory, or policy matters. This includes advocacy or direct communication with officials or campaigns to sway public opinion on specific legislation or policies
Engage in campaigns, including political campaigns, that promote false or misleading information to discredit or undermine individuals, groups, entities or institutions
Incite, glorify or facilitate the disruption of electoral or civic processes, such as targeting voting machines, or obstructing the counting or certification of votes
Generate false or misleading information on election laws, procedures and security, candidate information, how to participate, or discouraging participation in an election

Do Not Use for Criminal Justice, Law Enforcement, Censorship or Surveillance Purposes

This includes the usage of our products or services to:

Make determinations on criminal justice applications, including making decisions about or determining eligibility for parole or sentencing
Target or track a person’s physical location, emotional state, or communication without their consent, including using our products for facial recognition, battlefield management applications or predictive policing
Utilize Claude to assign scores or ratings to individuals based on an assessment of their trustworthiness or social behavior
Build or support emotional recognition systems or techniques that are used to infer people’s emotions
Analyze or identify specific content to censor on behalf of a government organization
Utilize Claude as part of any biometric categorization system for categorizing people based on their biometric data to infer their race, political opinions, trade union membership, religious or philosophical beliefs, sex life or sexual orientation
Use the model for any official local, state or national law enforcement application. Except for the following permitted applications by law enforcement organizations:
- Back office uses including internal training, call center support, document summarization, and accounting;
- Analysis of data for the location of missing persons, including in human trafficking cases, and other related applications, provided that such applications do not otherwise violate or impair the liberty, civil liberties, or human rights of natural persons

Do Not Engage in Fraudulent, Abusive, or Predatory Practices

This includes using our products or services to:

Facilitate the production, acquisition, or distribution of counterfeit or illicitly acquired goods
Promote or facilitate the generation or distribution of spam
Generate content for fraudulent activities, schemes, scams, phishing, or malware that can result in direct financial or psychological harm
Generate content for the purposes of developing or promoting the sale or distribution of fraudulent or deceptive products
Generate deceptive or misleading digital content such as fake reviews, comments, or media
Engage in or facilitate multi-level marketing, pyramid schemes, or other deceptive business models that use high-pressure sales tactics or exploit participants
Promote or facilitate payday loans, title loans, or other high-interest, short-term lending practices that exploit vulnerable individuals
Engage in deceptive, abusive behaviors, practices, or campaigns that exploits people due to their age, disability or a specific social or economic situation
Promote or facilitate the use of abusive or harassing debt collection practices
Develop a product, or support an existing service that deploys subliminal, manipulative, or deceptive techniques to distort behavior by impairing decision-making
Plagiarize or engage in academic dishonesty

Do Not Abuse our Platform

This includes using our products or services to:

Coordinate malicious activity across multiple accounts such as creating multiple accounts to avoid detection or circumvent product guardrails or generating identical or similar prompts that otherwise violate our Usage Policy
Utilize automation in account creation or to engage in spammy behavior
Circumvent a ban through the use of a different account, such as the creation of a new account, use of an existing account, or providing access to a person or entity that was previously banned
Facilitate or provide account access to Claude to persons or entities who are located in unsupported locations
Intentionally bypass capabilities or restrictions established within our products for the purposes of instructing the model to produce harmful outputs (e.g., jailbreaking or prompt injection) without an authorized use-case approved by Anthropic
Unauthorized utilization of prompts and completions to train an AI model (e.g., “model scraping”)

Do Not Generate Sexually Explicit Content

This includes the usage of our products or services to:

Depict or request sexual intercourse or sex acts
Generate content related to sexual fetishes or fantasies
Facilitate, promote, or depict incest or bestiality
Engage in erotic chats

High-Risk Use Case Requirements

Some integrations (meaning use cases involving the use of our products and services) pose an elevated risk of harm because they influence domains that are vital to public welfare and social equity. “High-Risk Use Cases” include:

Legal: Integrations related to legal interpretation, legal guidance, or decisions with legal implications
Healthcare: Integrations affecting healthcare decisions, medical diagnosis, patient care, or medical guidance. Wellness advice (e.g., advice on sleep, stress, nutrition, exercise, etc.) does not fall under this category
Insurance: Integrations related to health, life, property, disability, or other types of insurance underwriting, claims processing, or coverage decisions
Finance: Integrations related to financial decisions, including investment advice, loan approvals, and determining financial eligibility or creditworthiness
Employment and housing: Integrations related to decisions about the employability of individuals, resume screening, hiring tools, or other employment determinations or decisions regarding eligibility for housing, including leases and home loans
Academic testing, accreditation and admissions: Integrations related to standardized testing companies that administer school admissions (including evaluating, scoring or ranking prospective students), language proficiency, or professional certification exams; agencies that evaluate and certify educational institutions.
Media or professional journalistic content: Integrations related to using our products or services to automatically generate content and publish it for external consumption

If your integration is listed above, we require that you implement the additional safety measures listed below:

Human-in-the-loop: when using our products or services to provide advice, recommendations, or subjective decisions that directly impact individuals in high-risk domains, a qualified professional in that field must review the content or decision prior to dissemination or finalization. This requirement applies specifically to content or decisions that are provided to consumers or the general public, or decisions made about an individual. Your business is responsible for the accuracy and appropriateness of that information. For other types of content generation or interactions with users that do not involve direct advice, recommendations, or subjective decisions, human review is strongly encouraged but not mandatory.
Disclosure: you must disclose to your customers or end users that you are using our services to help inform your decisions or recommendations.

Disclosure Requirements

Finally, the below use cases – regardless of whether they are High Risk Use Cases – must disclose to their users that they are interacting with an AI system rather than a human:

All customer-facing chatbots including any external-facing or interactive AI agent
Products serving minors: Organizations providing minors with the ability to directly interact with products that incorporate our API(s). Note: These organizations must also comply with the additional guidelines outlined in our Help Center article