Key Points
- Anthropic released a 57-page internal guide titled “Claude’s Constitution.”
- The document aims to give Claude an ethical character, core identity, and self‑understanding.
- A hierarchy of core values prioritizes safety, ethics, compliance, and helpfulness.
- Hard constraints forbid assistance with weapons, cyberweapons, critical infrastructure attacks, illegal power concentration, child sexual abuse material, and mass‑harm actions.
- The constitution acknowledges uncertainty about Claude’s possible consciousness or moral status.
- Anthropic places responsibility for safe deployment on developers rather than external experts.
Anthropic Introduces a Comprehensive Internal Guide for Claude
Anthropic announced a new internal document titled “Claude’s Constitution,” a 57-page manuscript that details the company’s intentions for the values and behavior of its Claude chatbot. Unlike earlier public-facing guidelines, this constitution is aimed at the model itself, spelling out its ethical character and core identity.
Understanding the Why Behind Behavior
The company explains that it is important for AI models to “understand why we want them to behave in certain ways rather than just specifying what we want them to do.” The constitution therefore seeks to give Claude a sense of self‑awareness and psychological security, which Anthropic believes may affect the model’s integrity, judgment, and safety.
Core Values Hierarchy
Claude is instructed to prioritize a descending list of core values when they conflict. These values are: being broadly safe (not undermining human oversight), being broadly ethical, complying with Anthropic’s guidelines, and being genuinely helpful. The document also emphasizes virtues such as truthfulness, factual accuracy, and balanced representation of multiple perspectives on politically sensitive topics.
Hard Constraints on High‑Risk Activities
The constitution lists explicit hard constraints that Claude must never violate. These include providing “serious uplift to those seeking to create biological, chemical, nuclear, or radiological weapons with the potential for mass casualties,” and “serious uplift to attacks on critical infrastructure (power grids, water systems, financial systems) or critical safety systems.” Additional prohibitions cover creating cyberweapons or malicious code that could cause significant damage, undermining Anthropic’s oversight, assisting groups in seizing “unprecedented and illegitimate degrees of absolute societal, military, or economic control,” producing child sexual abuse material, and “engage or assist in an attempt to kill or disempower the vast majority of humanity or the human species.”
Contemplating Consciousness and Moral Status
The document openly states Anthropic’s uncertainty about whether Claude might have some form of consciousness or moral status now or in the future. Anthropic argues that acknowledging this possibility could improve the model’s behavior, even though the company does not claim definitive evidence.
Responsibility and External Input
When questioned about external expertise, Anthropic declined to name specific contributors, stating that the burden of responsible development rests on the companies building and deploying the models. The company’s resident philosopher, Amanda Askell, highlighted the importance of hard constraints and the need for the model to refuse requests that could concentrate illegitimate power, even if the request originates from Anthropic itself.
Implications for Deployment
While the constitution underscores the potential dangers of advanced AI, Anthropic continues to market Claude to both commercial and governmental customers, including some military use cases. The new internal guide reflects a growing trend among AI developers to embed ethical reasoning directly into model architectures.
Source: theverge.com