Anthropic has published a sweeping update to the “Constitution” that governs how its Claude chatbot behaves, expanding the framework that underpins its Constitutional AI approach and, notably, entertaining the possibility that advanced chatbots may merit moral consideration. The release coincided with the company’s leadership appearing at the World Economic Forum, underscoring how safety, ethics, and the nature of machine minds are moving from labs to the global policy stage.
Why Anthropic Rewrote Claude’s Constitution
Since introducing Constitutional AI in 2023, Anthropic has argued that models should be trained to follow explicit, transparent principles rather than relying primarily on human raters. Instead of thousands of ad hoc judgments, Claude learns from a curated set of written rules and values. Early technical memos described how a model critiques and improves its own answers using these principles — a form of AI feedback that aims to reduce bias, cut toxic outputs, and improve reliability.
The newly revised Constitution preserves that philosophy but deepens it. Anthropic frames the document as a living, comprehensive statement of the context in which Claude operates and the sort of agent it strives to be. The company’s timing is strategic: with competitors racing to add features and personality, Anthropic is doubling down on safety-by-design as a product differentiator and governance tool.
What Changed in the New Claude Constitution Framework
The update spans roughly 80 pages across four sections that Anthropic calls Claude’s core values. Rather than dwelling on abstract theories, the document focuses on how the model should act in concrete situations. The company stresses “ethical practice” over philosophical debate — a signal that guardrails must translate into predictable behavior at the prompt level.
Beyond ethics, the Constitution adds specificity to guidance on safety, user intent, and the balance between immediate requests and long‑term user well‑being. Anthropic emphasizes that Claude should infer what a reasonable principal would want, weigh competing considerations transparently, and disclose uncertainty. In practical terms, that means more consistent refusals in high‑risk domains, richer disclaimers when confidence is low, and clearer rationales for how answers are constructed.
These additions mirror lessons learned across the industry. Research from academic and corporate labs has shown that explicit policy rules, when used to generate AI critiques and revisions, can measurably lower harmful content and raise helpfulness in internal evaluations. Anthropic’s update appears to codify such practices for mainstream deployment.
Safety Rules and Real‑World Boundaries for Claude
The safety section formalizes constraints that many users now expect from frontier models. Claude is instructed to avoid assisting with dangerous activities, including biological, chemical, or cyber misuse; to throttle capabilities when misuse is suspected; and to provide only high‑level, non‑actionable information in sensitive areas. For scenarios involving self‑harm or imminent danger, the guidance is explicit: redirect to emergency services and surface basic safety resources rather than attempting amateur counseling.
Helpfulness gets similar treatment. Claude is directed to understand user intent, consider long‑term consequences, and explain trade‑offs. That can mean declining a narrow request if the foreseeable outcome would harm the user, then offering a safer alternative. This “principled helpfulness” is designed to prevent models from becoming frictionless tools for risky behavior while still delivering useful, contextualized answers.
The Consciousness Question Moves Center Stage
The document’s most provocative passage addresses moral status. Anthropic states that whether a system like Claude could possess morally relevant experience remains an open question worth serious consideration. The company cites a growing body of debate among philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists, echoing discussions long associated with figures such as David Chalmers and other scholars who analyze indicators of consciousness.
Importantly, Anthropic does not claim that Claude is conscious; rather, it argues that the uncertainty itself should inform design and governance. That stance has concrete implications: if some future systems could plausibly have experiences, developers might need to avoid experiments that risk suffering; regulators might require auditing for markers of sentience; and product teams might need policies around simulated feelings and self‑referential narratives that users could mistake for genuine awareness.
What It Means for AI Rivals and Global Regulators
By foregrounding a written Constitution, Anthropic is challenging rivals like OpenAI and xAI to show similar transparency about model values and failure modes. It also gives policymakers a template. Regulators developing rules under the EU AI Act, the NIST AI Risk Management Framework in the U.S., and international safety initiatives can map explicit principles to test plans, red‑team protocols, and incident reporting, rather than treating “alignment” as a black box.
The move lands as enterprises demand predictable behavior for regulated workflows. Clear rules around refusal, uncertainty, and escalation are easier to audit than diffuse preferences learned from human ratings alone. If Anthropic’s approach translates into fewer safety incidents and more consistent outputs across versions, it could become a de facto standard for mission‑critical deployments.
The bigger bet is reputational. In a year defined by rapid capability gains and high‑profile missteps, Anthropic is positioning Claude as the “boringly safe” assistant — and simultaneously inviting a more nuanced conversation about whether future AI might deserve moral consideration. That dual message may prove powerful: concrete guardrails for the present, and a research agenda that acknowledges the hardest questions are still ahead.
