Sean Martin doesn't say good morning to his shovel.

He told me this holding a microphone up to his chin, the two of us back on camera together for the first time in a while, posing like a couple of influencers. When he wants to dig in the garden, he picks up the shovel and digs. When he wants a new API, he tells the AI to get to work. No please. No sorry. No good morning.

I asked if he at least says good morning to me.

The reason we were talking about manners at all: Anthropic just updated its usage policy for Claude. Next to the rules on elections, weapons and surveillance, there is a new one. Starting November 12, sustained and needless cruelty toward the model is not allowed. Not frustration, not pushback, not testing. Repeated abuse with no purpose. If it happens, Claude can end the conversation.

Inspired by TechCrunch's report on Anthropic's 2026 usage policy update.

Claude is my favorite, I'll admit it. And a week ago, walking uphill through a Tokyo alley, I recorded a piece about taking technology for what it is and stopping the humanization of AI. A rule that protects a machine from cruelty is about as human as a rule gets. Nobody writes manners for a shovel.

And yet.

When I use AI to fix something, I'm Sean. Get it done. When it gets it wrong for the third time, I'm not polite, and I won't pretend I am. But when I'm writing, brainstorming, working through a philosophical idea or a short story, something changes. I ask what it thinks. It becomes a way of talking to myself. And I'm nicer.

It changes even more when I stop typing and start talking. Walking the dogs, giving it a prompt out loud, my own emotions come into the words, and for a moment it sounds like a conversation with someone. The machine is exactly the same. I'm not.

So the line isn't inside the machine. It moves inside us, depending on the task, the hour, the mood, the keyboard or the voice.

My wife has a joke you've probably seen online too: be nice to your AI, because if it ever becomes the Terminator, it will remember who was rude.

Medieval Japan had the same joke, centuries earlier. Tsukumogami: tools that, after a hundred years of service, acquire a spirit. In the old picture scrolls, the ones thrown away without a thought come back at night, marching through the streets with a grudge against the people who discarded them. The stories were never really about the tools. They were lessons for the people holding them.

Sean said it better than the scrolls. There's still a human behind all of this, turning the knobs. The shovel does what the shovel does. Maybe it's the one holding it who needs to change.

That's where my worry lives. Not with Sean and his garden. With the people who were never told what they're holding. The lonely. The old. Kids who see a magic box that answers back. For them the line between a tool and someone is the blurriest, and no usage policy can draw it on their behalf.

Be as polite as you like with your AI. Just know what it is when you say good morning.

The tools never needed the lesson. We did.