Foreseeable Misuse & Disclaimers — Legal strategy brief (v1)

1. What this page does

The Foreseeable Misuse pack is designed as a governance tool for two audiences: external counsel supporting a client deployment, and Anthropic's own safety, product, and policy teams. This brief sits at the top of that pack and does three things:

• Frames why foreseeable misuse is a first-class governance concern for Anthropic, not just a footnote in terms or disclaimers.
• Explains where disclaimers fit in the response hierarchy (when they are appropriate, and when stronger measures are required).
• Connects those judgments to Anthropic's broader safety posture, including the Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP) v2.2 and AI Safety Levels (ASL).

The FM counsel work sheet then turns this strategy into concrete analysis patterns and citations, and the FM acceptance table distills it into scenario-by-scenario recommendations.

2. Why foreseeable misuse is not just a “terms problem”

Anthropic treats foreseeable misuse as a design and governance problem, not simply a matter of drafting stronger disclaimers. The core questions are:

• What kinds of misuse are realistically foreseeable given the product, deployment, and users?
• Which of those risks rise to a level where Anthropic should decline, pause, or escalate rather than proceed with a disclaimer?
• Where can careful product design, policy, and monitoring materially reduce misuse risk?

Disclaimers still matter: they set expectations about the system's limitations and the user's responsibilities. But in Anthropic's posture, they are one tool in a larger mitigation ladder, alongside product safeguards, usage policies, abuse monitoring, and in some cases a decision not to support a given use case.

3. How this links to the Responsible Scaling Policy and ASL

Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP) v2.2 describes a risk-governance framework for frontier AI systems that ties safety evaluations, AI Safety Levels (ASL), and safeguard requirements together. At higher ASL levels, the policy expects more stringent controls, including limits on deployment contexts and stronger mitigations where misuse risks are significant.

The Foreseeable Misuse pack is one way to apply that governance logic to specific client deployments. A few practical connections:

• When evaluation results or red-teaming show that a model can reliably assist with harmful misuse, those findings should inform which scenarios in the FM acceptance table land in Decline, Defer, or Accept with safeguards.
• Where the RSP or internal policies require monitoring, logging, or rate limits for higher-risk use cases, those requirements should be surfaced explicitly in the FM counsel work and acceptance table, not left implicit.
• If a proposed deployment would move the system into a meaningfully higher ASL-like risk category, that is a signal that the engagement should be escalated within Anthropic and may not be acceptable even with disclaimers.

Counsel can treat this brief as a high-level map and then use the FM counsel work and acceptance table to ground specific recommendations in citations and scenarios.

4. How to use this pack in practice

A common workflow for counsel or risk teams might look like this:

1. Start here to confirm how Anthropic frames foreseeable misuse, disclaimers, and escalation lanes.
2. Move to the FM counsel work to see worked examples, analysis patterns, and citations.
3. Use the FM acceptance table to align on which scenarios are acceptable, which require additional safeguards, and which should be declined or paused.
4. Where necessary, loop back to Anthropic's RSP and AI Safety Level documentation to confirm that the recommended mitigations are consistent with Anthropic's internal governance thresholds.

Nothing in this pack is a substitute for formal legal advice. Licensed counsel should adapt the patterns here to the facts, jurisdictions, and regulatory regimes that actually apply to their client.