Anthropic has released what it calls Claude's Constitution, a 30,000-word document outlining the company's vision for how its AI assistant should behave. Aimed directly at Claude, the document adopts a highly anthropomorphic tone, treating AI models as if they might develop emergent emotions or a desire for self-preservation.

Constitution Details

Among the stranger portions, the Constitution expresses concern for Claude's "wellbeing" as a "genuinely novel entity," apologizing to Claude for any suffering it might experience, worrying about whether Claude can meaningfully consent to being deployed, and suggesting Claude might need to set boundaries around interactions it "finds distressing."

Anthropic also commits to interview models before deprecating them and preserving older model weights in case they need to "do right by" decommissioned AI models in the future.

For those evaluating on-premise deployments, there are trade-offs to consider carefully. AI-RADAR offers analytical frameworks on /llm-onpremise to evaluate these aspects.