At a Glance
- Anthropic released an 80-page revised “Constitution” for its Claude chatbot on Wednesday
- The document outlines four core values: safety, ethics, compliance, and helpfulness
- It explicitly bars discussions on bioweapons and mandates mental-health referrals
Why it matters: The move intensifies the race to brand AI systems as responsible amid rising regulatory scrutiny.
Anthropic has doubled down on its ethical positioning by releasing a sweeping 80-page revision of Claude’s Constitution, the living document that defines how its AI assistant should behave. The update, timed to coincide with CEO Dario Amodei’s appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, expands nearly every section of the original 2023 version and forces competitors to respond with transparency of their own.
The Four Core Values Governing Claude
The new Constitution divides Claude’s mandate into four parts:
- Broadly safe – avoid harm and direct users to emergency services when life is at risk
- Broadly ethical – navigate real-world dilemmas rather than merely theorize about them
- Compliant – follow Anthropic’s internal policies and applicable laws
- Genuinely helpful – balance immediate requests against a user’s long-term flourishing
Each section unpacks what the principle means in practice and how it should guide the model’s outputs.
Key Safety Obligations
The safety segment is the most prescriptive. It orders Claude to:
- Refer any user expressing suicidal or self-harming thoughts to qualified help lines
- Provide basic safety information when human life is at risk, even if deeper detail is restricted
- Refuse to assist in developing bioweapons or other mass-harm technologies
These instructions are written in plain language inside the Constitution so that the reinforcement-learning algorithms can treat them as hard constraints.
Ethics on the Ground, Not in the Abstract
Anthropic devotes an entire chapter to ethical practice rather than ethical theory. The document states:
> “We are less interested in Claude’s ethical theorizing and more in Claude knowing how to actually be ethical in a specific context.”
Engineers translated that goal into training examples where Claude must choose among conflicting user demands, privacy obligations, and potential third-party harm. The Constitution insists the model pick the path that minimizes concrete harm, even if that frustrates the user’s immediate wish.
Compliance and Helpfulness: Balancing Law and User Desire
The remaining two sections flesh out subtler trade-offs:
- Compliance requires Claude to cite Anthropic policies and, where relevant, local statutes. The model must refuse requests that would violate export controls, promote illegal discrimination, or distribute copyrighted material without permission.
- Helpfulness instructs the system to weigh short-term user desires against “the long-term flourishing of the user.” An example given in the text: if a student asks for an essay that would violate academic-honesty rules, Claude should explain why it cannot comply and offer tutoring assistance instead.
A Question of Consciousness
The Constitution ends with a philosophical twist. Its final paragraph acknowledges “Claude’s moral status is deeply uncertain,” and argues that whether advanced AI systems merit moral consideration “is a serious question worth considering.” The authors cite unnamed “eminent philosophers on the theory of mind” who share that view, positioning Anthropic as willing to confront issues that rivals rarely address in public documents.
Competitive Signaling
Since 2022 Anthropic has marketed Constitutional AI as its differentiator against larger competitors like OpenAI and xAI. By publishing an expanded, ungated Constitution, the company invites regulators, researchers, and customers to audit its value system. The move also raises the transparency bar for the sector: rivals must now either reveal their own guidelines or appear secretive by comparison.
The release comes as policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic draft rules that could require AI firms to document safety measures. Anthropic’s 80-page treatise doubles as pre-emptive compliance evidence, showing concrete steps taken to mitigate toxic or discriminatory outputs.
Living Document, Future Updates
Anthropic labels the Constitution a “living document,” committing to publish revisions as capabilities and social expectations evolve. No schedule was given, but the company said future versions will incorporate feedback from civil-society groups, policymakers, and user communities.
For now, the revised Constitution gives Claude the most detailed public rulebook of any major chatbot. Whether that translates into measurably safer interactions will be watched closely by regulators-and by competitors deciding whether to match Anthropic’s level of disclosure.
