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Claude New Constitution
blogCredibility Rating
4/5
High(4)High quality. Established institution or organization with editorial oversight and accountability.
Rating inherited from publication venue: Anthropic
This is Anthropic's official public specification of the values and priorities Claude is trained to internalize—a key primary source for understanding how Anthropic approaches constitutional AI and value alignment in practice.
Metadata
Importance: 72/100blog postprimary source
Summary
Anthropic announced an updated set of guidelines and values—referred to as a 'model spec' or 'constitution'—governing how Claude is trained to think and behave. This document outlines the principles Claude is expected to internalize, covering helpfulness, harmlessness, and honesty, as well as how Claude should prioritize competing values. It represents a shift toward more transparent, principle-based AI alignment rather than purely rule-based approaches.
Key Points
- •Anthropic published a revised 'model spec' (constitution) defining the values and behavioral norms Claude is trained to follow.
- •The document emphasizes a hierarchy of priorities: broadly safe, broadly ethical, adherent to Anthropic's principles, and genuinely helpful.
- •It moves toward teaching Claude underlying reasoning and values rather than just explicit rules, aiming for better generalization.
- •The spec addresses how Claude should handle conflicts between helpfulness and safety, and between user and operator instructions.
- •This transparency initiative allows external scrutiny of the normative choices embedded in Claude's training.
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| Anthropic | Organization | 74.0 |
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Announcements
# Claude's new constitution
Jan 22, 2026
[Read the constitution](http://anthropic.com/constitution)
We’re publishing a new constitution for our AI model, Claude. It’s a detailed description of Anthropic’s vision for Claude’s values and behavior; a holistic document that explains the context in which Claude operates and the kind of entity we would like Claude to be.
The constitution is a crucial part of our model training process, and its content directly shapes Claude’s behavior. Training models is a difficult task, and Claude’s outputs might not always adhere to the constitution’s ideals. But we think that the way the new constitution is written—with a thorough explanation of our intentions and the reasons behind them—makes it more likely to cultivate good values during training.
In this post, we describe what we’ve included in the new constitution and some of the considerations that informed our approach.
_We’re releasing Claude’s constitution in full under a [Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Deed](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/), meaning it can be freely used by anyone for any purpose without asking for permission._
## What is Claude’s Constitution?
Claude’s constitution is the foundational document that both expresses and shapes who Claude is. It contains detailed explanations of the values we would like Claude to embody and the reasons why. In it, we explain what we think it means for Claude to be helpful while remaining broadly safe, ethical, and compliant with our guidelines. The constitution gives Claude information about its situation and offers advice for how to deal with difficult situations and tradeoffs, like balancing honesty with compassion and the protection of sensitive information. Although it might sound surprising, the constitution is written _primarily for Claude_. It is intended to give Claude the knowledge and understanding it needs to act well in the world.
We treat the constitution as the final authority on how we want Claude to be and to behave—that is, any other training or instruction given to Claude should be consistent with both its letter and its underlying spirit. This makes publishing the constitution particularly important from a transparency perspective: it lets people understand which of Claude’s behaviors are intended versus unintended, to make informed choices, and to provide useful feedback. We think transparency of this kind will become ever more important as AIs start to exert more influence in society1.
We use the constitution at various stages of the training process. This has grown out of training techniques we’ve been using since 2023, when we first began training Claude models using [Constitutional AI](https://www.anthropic.com/research/constitutional-ai-harmlessness-from-ai-feedback). Our approach has evolved significantly sin
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