Anthropic's new Claude constitution is a philosophical document that explains the company's intentions and reasoning behind the model's behavioral guidelines, rather than listing specific rules. The company published it this week, and the interesting part isn't what it says. It's how it's written.
The previous constitution was a list of principles: do this, don't do that. The new one is written "primarily for Claude" to give the model "the knowledge and understanding it needs to act well in the world."
That framing matters. Anthropic is explicitly betting that explaining why produces better behavior than specifying what.
Rules vs. reasoning
The shift away from a rules-based approach is deliberate. Anthropic acknowledges that specific rules "can make models' actions more predictable, transparent, and testable," and they still use hard constraints for behaviors where Claude should never engage. But the company argues that rules "can also be applied poorly in unanticipated situations or when followed too rigidly."
This tracks with what we know about RLHF's limitations. Safety alignment that operates at the surface level, teaching models to refuse rather than teaching them to reason, tends to be brittle. A model that knows to say "I can't help with that" hasn't necessarily learned anything about why certain requests are problematic.
Anthropic's bet is that a model trained on explanations and context will generalize better than one trained on pattern-matching against rules. If Claude understands the spirit of the guidelines, the thinking goes, it can handle novel situations that a rulebook never anticipated.
The practical machinery
The constitution isn't just a mission statement. Claude uses it to generate synthetic training data: conversations where the constitution applies, responses that align with its values, and rankings of possible outputs. This creates a feedback loop where the document actively shapes future versions of the model.
This approach has evolved from Anthropic's Constitutional AI work dating back to 2023, but the new constitution plays what the company calls "an even more central role in training."
The dual purpose constrains how the document is written. It needs to work both as abstract philosophy and as practical training material. That's a hard balance to strike.
The real bet
Anthropic frames the constitution as addressing "a dauntingly novel and high-stakes project: creating safe, beneficial non-human entities whose capabilities may come to rival or exceed our own." That's not typical corporate language, and it reflects the company's positioning as the safety-focused alternative in a market dominated by OpenAI and Google.
The transparency angle is worth noting. Anthropic is releasing the constitution under a Creative Commons CC0 license, which means anyone can use or adapt it. The stated goal is to let users understand which Claude behaviors are intentional versus accidental, so they can "make informed choices, and provide useful feedback."
Our read: this is Anthropic attempting to solve alignment through comprehension rather than compliance. Instead of training Claude to pattern-match against a list of prohibited behaviors, they're trying to instill something closer to values that the model can reason from.
Whether that works remains an open question. Teaching an AI to reason about ethics is harder than teaching it to follow rules. There's no guarantee a model trained on philosophical explanations will actually internalize them; it might just pattern-match against a more elaborate rulebook. But it's the right question to be asking, and Anthropic is putting its approach in public in ways that invite scrutiny.
The document is "no doubt flawed in many ways," Anthropic admits. But they want future models to look back on it as "an honest and sincere attempt" to help Claude understand its situation. That's a level of epistemic humility you don't often see from companies building systems they believe might eventually rival human capabilities.