We’ve trained Claude to flag potential misuse in conversations, a technique we call self-assessment. Right after it responds, Claude gives a preliminary safety assessment of the conversation. Since we began using self-assessment in June, it has surfaced misuse that our other safeguards weren’t designed to catch. Because Claude has already read the conversation, self-assessment is very efficient. And unlike classifiers, which target a discrete set of harms, it draws on Claude’s own judgment, so it gets more accurate as our models improve. Read more on our new Safeguards blog: https://safeguards.anthropic.com/2026/self-assessment/
Why it matters
The comparison with separate classifiers clarifies how reusing conversation context lowers monitoring costs while reported red-team results explain the limits of using self-assessment for immediate blocking.










