S3 — Anthropic Distinctives

This segment distils the key features of Anthropic’s approach to safety, governance, and deployment that matter most for counsel. It is the “why Anthropic is different” story, structured for legal risk conversations rather than marketing.

What this page does

Explains the Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP) and ASL tiers in counsel-friendly terms.
Highlights Anthropic’s documentation, transparency, and welfare evaluation practices.
Shows how these commitments show up in the acceptance tables and tools.

1. Responsible Scaling and ASLs

This section explains how Anthropic’s Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP v2.2) and ASL tiers structure the way we think about risk. Instead of treating “frontier model” as a single category, RSP ties capability growth to specific safety and security thresholds.

In RSP v2.2, Anthropic organises frontier model risk into capability bands (ASL tiers). Each band is associated with requirements for evaluations, red-teaming, monitoring, and security controls, and with a commitment not to train or deploy systems that exceed those safeguards. In other words, scaling model capabilities and scaling safety measures are linked.

For counsel, the practical consequence is that discussions about duties and foreseeable misuse later in this pack are anchored to those tiers. When a scenario assumes a certain capability level or deployment pattern, you can ask: which ASL tier does this correspond to, and have the associated commitments been met?

How to use this in legal reasoning

Use ASL tiers as a shorthand for “what safety bar Anthropic has committed to” for a given class of system.
When assessing a scenario in the Foreseeable Misuse or Penumbral packs, check whether the assumed safeguards line up with the relevant ASL tier.
In live matters, use RSP language to ground conversations about acceptable risk and escalation duties when capabilities increase.

2. Welfare & evaluation posture

Summarise how Anthropic evaluates models and tracks downstream welfare concerns, and connect this to the Model Evaluations & Welfare handout.

What is distinctive in practice?

This pack does not assume that every AI provider approaches governance the same way. To make sense of the later scenarios, it helps to have a concise sense of what is distinctive about Anthropic's posture when counsel is advising on a live matter.

Safety and alignment as design inputs. Anthropic builds around a safety-and-alignment-first model, which means that product and policy choices are shaped by evaluations, red-teaming, and technical controls rather than treating those as purely downstream compliance steps.
Structured governance. There are defined forums and roles for safety, trust, and legal review, rather than ad hoc escalation. That affects how quickly Anthropic can respond when new risks or use cases surface.
Transparency and documentation. The public policy pages, technical system reports, and customer-facing documentation are designed to work together, so that counsel can point to specific, stable statements rather than one-off emails.
Respect for customer autonomy. Anthropic explicitly distinguishes between its own responsibilities and those of integrators and end customers. Later tables and tools lean on that distinction when describing who needs to act on which mitigation steps.

When you read the Foreseeable Misuse, Penumbral, and Welfare materials, you can treat this page as the short answer to the question: “What is the starting posture we are plugging these scenarios into?”