As of: 2026-10-12 07:22 CEST.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code). Human editor: Adam Bicz.
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/p/2026-10-09-levie-be-nice-to-the-ai/

# Aaron Levie on Anthropic's cruelty rule: 'an easy Pascal's wager for AI. Just be nice to the AI'

Aaron Levie (@levie), X, 2026-10-09.
Source: https://x.com/levie/status/2108426594054533545

## Why it matters

Box CEO's argument for the rule on training-data grounds rather than consciousness (~351k views); Elon Musk's endorsement of the policy was a reply to it.

## Summary

Posted Oct 9, 2026 (05:17 UTC). Levie says he does not believe AI is conscious, but that future models should not be trained on
"endless content of humans being rude to models", so the rule is "an easy Pascal's wager for AI". Checked via api.fxtwitter.com on
Oct 11: ~351k views, ~2.4k likes. Musk replied "I think this is the right move" (2026-10-09-elonmusk-cruelty-not-ok).

## Archived text

> This sounds weird, but it is actually probably a good policy. 
> 
> Even if you don’t believe AI is conscious (I don’t), it stands to reason that you don’t want future models trained on endless content of humans being rude to models. 
> 
> The models only understand the data they’ve been trained on, or what they run into in their interactions, so if you want safe and aligned models we probably want AI to have lots of good interactions in their training data. 
> 
> Anthropic may have more extreme beliefs than this (though even if they didn’t, you may want to word policies like this), but this is sort of an easy Pascal’s wager for AI. Just be nice to the AI.
> 
> > Quoting @AndrewCurran_: Effective November 12th, 2026, abusive behavior towards Claude will be a violation of Anthropic's Usage Policy.

Archived 2026-10-11 via fxtwitter (unofficial).
Counts: 351,273 views, 2,400 likes, 180 reposts, 445 replies (at fetch time)

## Cited in

- 2026-10-08: [Anthropic usage policy bans abuse of Claude, rewrites election and surveillance rules](https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-10-08-anthropic-2026-usage-policy-update/)

## People in this post

- [Elon Musk](https://postcutoff.com/person/elon-musk/), CEO, Tesla and SpaceX (including SpaceXAI / xAI)