Anthropic introduces Claude self-assessment to flag potential misuse

Anthropic introduced self-assessment on Oct. 16, 2026, to have Claude assess conversations for potentially harmful requests after it responds. The company says a short follow-up instruction prompts Claude to produce a preliminary assessment covering the possible harm, its type, a priority for human review, whether Claude refused and a brief explanation. Those assessments feed additional offline review, including for conversations in which Claude refused a request.

Anthropic says the monitor runs across a large fraction of Claude’s global traffic. In an Oct. 29 post, the company said it had used self-assessment since June and that it surfaced misuse other safeguards were not designed to catch. Anthropic estimates each assessment generates about 10 additional output tokens on average and adds less than 2% to inference compute across its production API traffic distribution.