Usage policy update

Today, we’re sharing some updates to our Usage Policy that reflect the growing capabilities and evolving usage of our products. Our Usage Policy serves as a framework for how Claude should and shouldn’t be used, providing clear guidance for everyone who uses Anthropic’s products.

In this update, our goal is to provide greater clarity and detail on our Policy based on user feedback, product changes, regulatory developments, and our enforcement priorities. These changes will take effect on September 15, 2025.

Below is a summary of some of the changes, and you can view the new Usage Policy here .

To address these risks, we've added a section to our Usage Policy outlining the malicious computer, network, and infrastructure compromise activities that are prohibited by Anthropic. We continue to support use cases that strengthen cybersecurity, such as discovering vulnerabilities with the system owner's consent.

We’ve heard from users that this blanket approach also limited legitimate use of Claude for policy research, civic education, and political writing. We're now tailoring our restrictions to specifically prohibit use cases that are deceptive or disruptive to democratic processes, or involve voter and campaign targeting. This approach enables legitimate political discourse and research while prohibiting activity that is misleading or invasive.

Our previous Usage Policy language on law enforcement included various exceptions for back-office tools and analytical applications, which occasionally made it difficult to understand which use cases were permitted.

Over the past year, we’ve seen rapid advances in agentic capabilities. We've released our own agentic tools like Claude Code and Computer Use, and our models power many of the world's leading coding agents.

These powerful capabilities introduce new risks, including potential for scaled abuse, malware creation, and cyber attacks, as shared in our first threat intelligence report, Detecting and Countering Malicious Uses of Claude: March 2025 .

We’ve also published a new article to our Help Center on how our Usage Policy applies to agentic use more broadly. This supplementary guidance provides concrete examples of prohibited activities in agentic contexts, and is not meant to replace or supersede our Usage Policy.