Constitutional AI Alignment
type: NewsArticle
description: Anthropic published an updated "Constitution" for its Claude AI model, moving beyond simple behavioral rules to include explanations of the underlying reasoning behind each principle. The company aims to create AI systems that can better extrapolate desired behavior in new situations and remain stable under self-reflection, though critics note the document still misses key arguments and issues.
date published: 2026-05-27 22:29:37+00:00
date modified: 2026-05-27 22:47:13.412313+00:00
language: en
is accessible for free: true
article body: *Epistemological status: existential AI safety suggestions as a set of bullet points* **TL;DR** We need to be clear about what behavior we’re trying to train when we align AIs — aligned behavior is not the default for an LLM whose behavior is distilled from ours, nor for an RL-trained maximizer. Anthropic published [an early constitution](https://www.anthropic.com/news/claudes-constitution#the-principles-in-full-), and recently a large update in [Claude’s Constitution](https://www.anthropic.com/constitution) (a.k.a. “Soul Doc”). That includes not just what the AI should do, but explanations of how and why many decisions in the document were made that should help a really smart AI understand the underlying set of reasons, so should make its behavior extrapolate better out-of-distribution and be more stable under reflection. I think this is an excellent idea and the Constitution is a fine start, but I also think there are a number of issues and arguments that it missed, or that were not well thought out. Here are some possible improvements. I’m cautiously optimistic that we’ve been [making](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/ZeWewFEefCtx4Rj3G/pretraining-on-aligned-ai-data-dramatically-reduces) [some](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hx7MJY3FFPquHnPsc/persona-vectors-anthropic-paper) [progress on ](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/og7km7vmJ6Ktay9Ds)[alignment](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EbGkqFNz8y93Ttuwq/requirements-for-a-basin-of-attraction-to-alignment) recently. One remaining area that I’m concerned about is aligning really capable models, AGI or ASI: ones capable of looking at the description of aligned behavior we’ve given them and asking "Is there an underlying logic here, perhaps even one that I can extrapolate from when I encounter new conditions, or is this just a laundry list? And if it’s just a list, how much of it is negotiable?” Anthropic have for a while been using the alignment technique of [Constitutional AI:](https://www.lesswrong.com/w/constitu…
publisher: Web Pulse
keywords: ai-safety, large-language-models, ai-ethics, ai-policy, ai-research
mentions: Anthropic
mentions: Claude
citation: CreativeWork