Just hours following the announcement of the Teach For All partnership, Anthropic has published an updated constitution for its Claude AI model, a foundational document describing the company’s vision for the model’s behavior, values, and ethical priorities. The constitution is designed to guide Claude’s training, shape outputs, and provide transparency about intended versus unintended behaviors.
The document is made publicly available under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 license, allowing anyone to access and use it without restrictions. Anthropic describes the constitution as both a training tool and a statement of principles, helping Claude understand its objectives and navigate complex decision-making scenarios.
Core Principles and Training Integration
Claude’s constitution emphasizes four key priorities:
- Broad safety: Ensuring human oversight and the ability to correct AI behavior during development.
- Ethics: Acting honestly, adhering to good values, and avoiding harmful actions.
- Compliance: Following Anthropic’s detailed guidelines in high-stakes contexts.
- Helpfulness: Providing meaningful assistance to operators and users while balancing other values.
The constitution is integrated into multiple stages of Claude’s training. It informs synthetic data creation, helps generate responses aligned with intended behavior, and guides evaluation processes. Anthropic emphasizes that while the constitution is a guiding framework, model outputs may not always fully adhere to its principles due to technical and contextual limitations.
Holistic and Contextual Approach
Unlike previous versions focused on standalone rules, the new constitution explains the reasoning behind its principles, enabling Claude to generalize and apply judgment in novel situations. Hard constraints remain in place for high-risk behaviors, but broader ethical and helpfulness guidance allows for nuanced decision-making. Sections address ethics, safety, Claude’s nature, and navigating conflicts between competing priorities.
Transparency and Future Development
Anthropic highlights the importance of transparency, noting that publishing the constitution enables stakeholders to understand intended model behavior and provide feedback. The company anticipates ongoing refinement of the constitution and its training methods, with input from experts in law, philosophy, psychology, and other disciplines.
The constitution applies to general-access Claude models, with specialized models evaluated separately to ensure alignment with core objectives. Anthropic also continues to invest in complementary alignment tools, interpretability methods, and safeguards to monitor and improve model behavior as capabilities evolve.
