Anthropic releases a new constitution for its AI model—Claude, which might be the biggest differentiator from competitive AI platforms. Anthropic shifts its focus towards prioritising transparency and logical explanations over canned warning while providing any kind of information that might come off as restrictive or harmful. The new constitution is a detailed description of Anthropic’s vision for Claude and gives a holistic idea about its operations.
Anthropic’s Core Idea
The new constitution seeks to ensure that all Claude models are broadly safe, ethical, compliant, and genuinely helpful. Unlike the earlier version, which relied heavily on a set of standalone principles, the updated framework moves away from a purely mechanical, rule-based approach. Instead of simply training models to follow instructions, it adopts a more holistic method that helps them better understand user intent, context, and the underlying purpose behind each request.
Anthropic does not want Claude to function as a rigid, rule-bound AI tool. Instead, it aims for Claude to offer thoughtful alternative solutions that genuinely serve users’ needs and help them understand the intent behind so. The focus is on making Claude substantively helpful—approaching problems with care, nuance, and a clear intent to add real value. At the same time, Anthropic’s guidelines require the model to treat sensitive instructions with the highest level of caution. For areas such as healthcare or cybersecurity, Claude may provide only high-level or supplementary information.
The New Constitution
Anthropic aims for AI models to deeply understand the principles embedded in the constitution. Rather than just listing instructions, the models must be explained why they are trained the way they are, helping them internalize the reasoning behind the key principles. Accordingly, in order for models such as Claude to use sound judgement, they need to be able to generalize and apply broad ethical and safety principles to a wide range of contexts and situations.
The document states that it “is written with Claude as its primary audience, so it might read differently than you’d expect. For example, it’s optimized for precision over accessibility, and it covers various topics that may be of less interest to human readers.” The model would continue valuing human well-being and steering away from strict rule following. If and when the model is asked for some bias information, it would prioritize explaining the reason behind such bias based on the constitution’s principles.
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