Aug. 13, 2025 –
Anthropic has detailed its safety strategy to try and keep its popular AI model, Claude, helpful while avoiding perpetuating harms.
Central to this effort is Anthropic’s Safeguards team; who aren’t your average tech support group, they’re a mix of policy experts, data scientists, engineers, and threat analysts who know how bad actors think.
However, Anthropic’s approach to safety isn’t a single wall but more like a castle with multiple layers of defence. It all starts with creating the right rules and ends with hunting down new threats in the wild.
First up is the Usage Policy, which is basically the rulebook for how Claude should and shouldn’t be used. It gives clear guidance on big issues like election integrity and child safety, and also on using Claude responsibly in sensitive fields like finance or healthcare.
To shape these rules, the team uses a Unified Harm Framework. This helps them think through any potential negative impacts, from physical and psychological to economic and societal harm. It’s less of a formal grading system and more of a structured way to weigh the risks when making decisions. They also bring in outside experts for Policy Vulnerability Tests. These specialists in areas like terrorism and child safety try to “break” Claude with tough questions to see where the weaknesses are.
We saw this in action during the 2024 US elections. After working with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, Anthropic realised Claude might give out old voting information. So, they added a banner that pointed users to TurboVote, a reliable source for up-to-date, non-partisan election info.
The Anthropic Safeguards team works closely with the developers who train Claude to build safety from the start. This means deciding what kinds of things Claude should and shouldn’t do, and embedding those values into the model itself.
They also team up with specialists to get this right. For example, by partnering with ThroughLine, a crisis support leader, they’ve taught Claude how to handle sensitive conversations about mental health and self-harm with care, rather than just refusing to talk. This careful training is why Claude will turn down requests to help with illegal activities, write malicious code, or create scams.
Before any new version of Claude goes live, it’s put through its paces with three key types of evaluation...