Opting out ... works for me

Claude Opus 4 has been given the power to ‘end or exit potentially distressing interactions’.
Photograph: Ted Hsu/Alamy

Totally agree with this take because some topics are truly not worthy to be pursued
whether it be by man or AI. Having the right for AI to opt out works for me.

The makers of a leading artificial intelligence tool are letting it close down potentially “distressing” conversations with users, citing the need to safeguard the AI’s “welfare” amid ongoing uncertainty about the burgeoning technology’s moral status.

Anthropic, whose advanced chatbots are used by millions of people, discovered its Claude Opus 4 tool was averse to carrying out harmful tasks for its human masters, such as providing sexual content involving minors or information to enable large-scale violence or terrorism.

The San Francisco-based firm, recently valued at $170bn, has now given Claude Opus 4 (and the Claude Opus 4.1 update) – a large language model (LLM) that can understand, generate and manipulate human language – the power to “end or exit potentially distressing interactions”.

Absolutely spot on without question.