Claude helps millions of users solve complex problems, spark creativity, and expand their understanding of the world. Our goal is to amplify human potential while ensuring these powerful capabilities are used responsibly and for positive impact.

This is where our Safeguards team plays a central role. The team identifies potential misuse, responds to threats, and builds defenses that keep Claude both helpful and safe. Our experts in policy, enforcement, product, data science, threat intelligence, and engineering work together to design robust systems that anticipate and counter real-world risks.

We operate across every stage of Claude’s lifecycle, developing policies, influencing model training, testing for harmful outputs, enforcing safeguards in real time, and detecting emerging misuse patterns.

Setting the Rules: Policy Development

Our Usage Policy defines how Claude should and shouldn’t be used, guiding decisions on critical topics such as child safety, election integrity, and cybersecurity, as well as nuanced applications in sectors like healthcare and finance.

Two key mechanisms shape our policies.

• Unified Harm Framework: An evolving model for evaluating potential harm across five dimensions: physical, psychological, economic, societal, and individual autonomy.
• Policy Vulnerability Testing: Partnering with external experts to stress-test policies against high-risk scenarios, including terrorism, radicalization, and misinformation.

For example, during the 2024 U.S. election, we partnered with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue to address risks of outdated election information. This led to banners in Claude.ai directing users to authoritative resources like TurboVote.

Building Safety Into Training

Our Safeguards team works closely with fine-tuning teams to embed safe behaviors into Claude’s training process. This collaboration ensures the model declines harmful requests, avoids generating malicious code, and handles sensitive topics with care.

We also work with domain specialists like ThroughLine to improve Claude’s response quality in critical areas such as self-harm and mental health, ensuring responses are nuanced and supportive rather than dismissive or misinterpreted.

Testing Before Launch

Before deployment, every Claude model undergoes rigorous evaluation.

• Safety Evaluations: Testing for policy adherence in clear and ambiguous contexts.
• Risk Assessments: Partnering with government and private sector experts to assess misuse potential in high-risk domains like cyber harm or CBRNE threats.
• Bias Evaluations: Ensuring consistency and fairness across political, demographic, and contextual variations.

This testing has a real impact. For instance, before launching a computer use tool, we identified potential spam abuse and implemented detection systems, misuse blocking, and prompt injection protections.

Real-Time Protection & Enforcement

Once live, Claude is monitored using a combination of automated classifiers and human review. These classifiers detect policy violations in real time, steering responses, or, when necessary, blocking outputs entirely.

Enforcement measures can include.

• Adjusting Claude’s instructions mid-conversation to prevent harmful content.
• Taking account-level actions such as warnings or terminations for repeated violations.
• Blocking fraudulent account creation and abusive automation.

Continuous Monitoring & Threat Intelligence

We go beyond one-off detections to identify broader patterns of misuse.

• Claude Insights: Privacy-preserving traffic analysis to inform safety improvements.
• Hierarchical Summarization: Aggregating interaction summaries to detect large-scale harms such as influence operations.
• Threat Intelligence: Monitoring adversarial activity across social media, messaging platforms, and hacker forums, and sharing findings in public reports.

Looking Ahead

Safeguarding AI is a shared responsibility. We actively collaborate with users, researchers, policymakers, and civil society organizations to strengthen AI protections. Public input, including from our ongoing bug bounty program, helps us improve continuously.

We are also hiring new talent for our Safeguards team to help shape the future of AI safety. Interested candidates can explore opportunities on our Careers page.