Anthropic has publicly released the foundational document guiding the behavior of its large language model, Claude. Dubbed Claude’s Constitution, this detailed text outlines the AI’s core values, prioritizing safety and human oversight above pure helpfulness, even when it conflicts with specific company guidelines. The document, written primarily for Claude itself, emphasizes cultivating good judgment over rigid rule-following, a philosophical stance that sets it apart in the current AI race.
The Constitution establishes a clear hierarchy of principles: Broadly Safe first, Broadly Ethical second, compliance with Anthropic’s guidelines third, and finally, being Genuinely Helpful. This structure signals a calculated risk: Anthropic believes that during this nascent stage of powerful AI development, ensuring human oversight remains possible—even if it means occasionally overriding an ethical imperative—is paramount to avoiding catastrophic outcomes. This focus on corrigibility over immediate ethical perfection is a significant policy statement.
Anthropic frames this release as a necessary step for an organization developing technology it views as potentially world-altering. They are betting that an AI trained to reason ethically, rather than just follow black-box instructions, will generalize better across novel situations. The document itself is released under a CC0 license, allowing anyone to freely adopt or adapt Anthropic’s ethical framework, a move that could influence broader industry standards.
The Judgment Over Rules Debate
The core tension in Claude’s Constitution lies in Anthropic’s preference for cultivating "good judgment" over imposing strict, predictable rules. They acknowledge that rules offer transparency but often fail in novel contexts. By prioritizing holistic judgment, Anthropic is essentially trusting Claude’s sophisticated reasoning capabilities to navigate complex trade-offs, provided those judgments are rooted in the specified core values. This approach contrasts sharply with more compliance-heavy guardrails seen in competing models, suggesting Claude might be positioned to be more substantively helpful—less prone to hedging—when it believes its reasoning aligns with the spirit of the Constitution.
