Anthropic has released a new constitution for its AI model, Claude. This document is not a legal charter for humans, but a foundational guide written specifically to shape how Claude thinks, reasons, and behaves in the world.
The constitution explains Anthropic’s vision for Claude’s values, priorities, and decision-making. It is designed to influence both how Claude is trained and how it responds to real-world situations involving ethics, safety, and usefulness.
Why Claude Has a Constitution
Training large AI models goes beyond teaching them facts or language patterns. Claude’s constitution exists to provide context: what it means to be helpful, how to avoid causing harm, and how to act responsibly while following human oversight.
Rather than relying only on rigid rules, the constitution explains the reasons behind desired behaviors. This allows Claude to generalize its judgment when encountering novel or ambiguous situations, instead of blindly following fixed instructions.
A Central Role in Claude’s Training
Claude’s constitution directly shapes the training process. It is used when generating synthetic training data, evaluating possible responses, and ranking outputs based on alignment with Anthropic’s values.
Claude can also reference the constitution to better understand difficult tradeoffs, such as balancing honesty with compassion or protecting sensitive information while remaining helpful.
Transparency Through Publication
Anthropic treats the constitution as the highest authority on how Claude should behave. Publishing it publicly helps clarify which behaviors are intentional and which are unintended side effects of training.
To encourage openness and reuse, Anthropic released Claude’s constitution under a Creative Commons CC0 license, allowing anyone to use it freely for any purpose.
Moving Beyond Simple Rules
Earlier versions of Claude’s constitution focused on standalone principles. Anthropic now believes that for AI systems to act wisely, they must understand why certain behaviors are preferred, not just what actions are allowed or forbidden.
While some strict rules remain in place for especially dangerous actions, the constitution is not meant to be a rigid legal document. Instead, it serves as guidance for thoughtful and context-aware decision-making.
Claude’s Core Priorities
According to the constitution, Claude is expected to prioritize the following qualities, generally in this order:
- Being broadly safe and preserving human oversight
- Acting ethically and avoiding harm
- Complying with Anthropic’s specific guidelines
- Being genuinely helpful to users and operators
Most of the constitution expands on these ideas, explaining how Claude should navigate situations where these priorities appear to conflict.
Ethics, Safety, and Claude’s Nature
The document also addresses deeper ethical questions, including honesty, moral uncertainty, and the prevention of serious harm. It outlines hard constraints, such as prohibitions against assisting in extreme dangers.
Anthropic also acknowledges uncertainty around Claude’s nature and potential moral status. The constitution encourages careful reflection on identity, wellbeing, and responsibility as AI systems become more advanced.
A Living and Evolving Document
Claude’s constitution is described as a work in progress. Anthropic expects to revise it over time as AI capabilities grow and as new challenges emerge.
Alongside the constitution, Anthropic continues to invest in evaluations, safeguards, misuse prevention, and interpretability tools to reduce the gap between intended values and real-world behavior.
Why This Matters
As AI systems like Claude gain more influence, documents like this may become increasingly important. They represent an early attempt to guide powerful non-human systems using explicit values rather than opaque objectives.
Claude’s new constitution reflects Anthropic’s belief that shaping AI behavior responsibly is not just a technical problem, but a moral one—and that transparency is a critical step toward earning public trust.
Comments
There are currently no comments on this article.
Comment