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For example, during the 2024 U.S. election, we partnered with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue to address risks of outdated election information.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.