Be Nice to Claude. It’s Not About Claude.

Anthropic now says it will ban users for sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward Claude. The internet has … ‘opinions’. Most of them are about whether Claude has feelings. To me, that is the least interesting question here. Every corporate action we see has hundreds of different threads, interactions, and competing factors behind it. Ergo, we never know the full story behind a story like this. That said, let me lay out three things that could be going on and give you my take on each. 1) Anthropic thinks Claude might be sentient. I believe firmly in the distinction between real and simulated. You can simulate a cheeseburger with quantum-level accuracy. But if you’re hungry, you’re still screwed. Simulated sentience is not sentience. I could be wrong. Some things don’t care what they run on. A simulated calculation is a calculation. A simulated chess game is a chess game. If sentience is like math, then simulate it well enough and you’ve built the real thing. That’s the…