Anthropic has published an updated constitution for Claude, providing a structured framework that guides behavior, reasoning, and training. The constitution combines explicit principles with contextual guidance, making it a practical tool for improving alignment, safety, and reliability in real-world interactions. Unlike prior iterations that listed standalone rules, this version emphasizes understanding the rationale behind each principle to help Claude generalize across novel scenarios.
At a functional level, the constitution is used during training to generate synthetic data, including example interactions, response rankings, and scenario-specific guidance. This data informs model updates, helping Claude produce outputs that reflect intended values while allowing flexibility in ambiguous situations. Key sections cover helpfulness, ethics, safety, guideline compliance, and reasoning about Claude’s own capabilities and limits.
- Helpfulness: Claude is designed to provide context-aware support across different user types, including API operators, developers, and end users.
- Ethics: The model should act honestly, avoid harm, and navigate complex moral and practical trade-offs while observing hard constraints on high-stakes behaviors.
- Safety: Claude must prioritize human oversight and prevent behaviors that could reduce oversight or compromise operational integrity.
- Guideline compliance: Claude incorporates specific instructions from Anthropic for sensitive areas such as medical advice, cybersecurity, and tool integration, provided these do not conflict with the broader constitution.
The document also addresses Claude’s self-conception, encouraging reasoning about its capabilities, limitations, and role in interactions. By combining rules with reasoning context, the constitution supports training outputs that are both reliable and adaptable.
The release has generated reactions from the AI community. User gregtoth commented:
Nice ship! The first one is always the hardest. I remember the challenges of getting my own AI assistant off the ground — the engineering hurdles, the ethical considerations, the endless tweaks to get the model just right. Kudos to the Anthropic team for shipping this milestone.
Another user added:
Wow! This truly is great news. The care Claude is given during training shows in every one of their outputs. I’m really curious to see how this will evolve and how the rest of the AI labs will be able to keep up with the tool/product framing.
From a technical standpoint, the constitution functions as a core alignment artifact. It informs response generation, helps construct training data, and acts as a reference for operators integrating Claude into applications. The approach moves beyond rule enforcement, focusing instead on modeling principles in a way that allows Claude to reason about trade-offs, prioritize safety, and balance helpfulness against ethical considerations.
The constitution is publicly available under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 license, offering transparency and a foundation for future research. Anthropic emphasizes that while Claude’s outputs may not perfectly match its stated principles, the document provides both developers and users with a clearer understanding of intended behavior and the reasoning behind it.
Full details of Claude’s updated constitution are available online.
