Anthropic announced an expanded AI Constitution for its main AI model, Claude. This marks a big change in how the company defines and governs its model’s behavior. The updated constitution moves from separate principles to a wider framework. This encourages Claude to consider values, judgment, and ethics rather than just strict rules. The full document is available to the public. It’s licensed under Creative Commons CC0 1.0. This supports open access, transparency, and collaboration in the industry.
The new AI Constitution lays out clear steps for guiding Claude’s behavior. It aims to make Claude safe and ethical, follow Anthropic’s guidelines, and be truly helpful to users and operators. These four core priorities are designed to help Claude generalize its reasoning and apply values across novel and complex situations encountered during real-world use.
Anthropic focuses on teaching Claude why some behaviors are good, not just what’s okay. This strategy shows that good AI systems should blend values and judgment into their decisions. This way, they can respond in a nuanced and context-sensitive way, not just by following rules.
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The new constitution includes expanded guidance on:
The importance of helpfulness, valuing genuine substantive assistance while accounting for context and user needs.
Compliance with Anthropic’s ethical and safety guidelines on specific topics such as medical advice, cybersecurity, and tool integrations.
Claude’s ethical reasoning and the standards of honesty and judgment Anthropic aims for in its AI systems.
The model’s role in upholding human oversight and maintaining safety during this phase of AI development.
Reflections on Claude’s nature, identity, and potential moral status as AI capabilities evolve.
Anthropic thinks that sharing the full constitution will help people grasp responsible AI design. This enables developers, researchers, and businesses to use or change parts of the framework for their AI systems. This open-licensing approach drives innovation across the industry. It also makes AI governance and ethical implementation easier to access.
The company mentioned that the constitution is a “living” document. It can be updated as capabilities, contexts, and societal expectations change. Anthropic will provide more materials in the future for training, evaluation, and transparency.