Leading AI companies are hiring philosophers to craft constitutional rules that guide AI behaviour. These experts debate between deontological and other ethical frameworks to ensure consistent, principled actions from systems deployed in homes and public spaces.

• Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind have each hired dozens of philosophers to write "constitutions" governing AI behavior, favoring different ethical frameworks (Anthropic's Kantian deontology vs. DeepMind's utilitarian harm-scoring system).
• These philosophers work directly with engineers to convert abstract principles into training data and reward signals, not just theoretical writing.
• OpenAI tracks rule violations per thousand queries, targeting under 0.5 for high-risk categories like medical or legal advice.
• Critics argue these philosophers lack technical expertise and that the resulting AI constitutions still rely on opaque enforcement mechanisms.

The article discusses the new version of Claude's constitution, which outlines explicit values for AI behavior. It explains how Constitutional AI improves upon traditional human feedback by using AI-generated principles to ensure safer and more transparent model outputs. The principles aim to address ethical concerns while allowing for continuous improvement.

• Constitutional AI replaces most human feedback with AI self-critique against a written constitution, then AI-generated reinforcement learning for harmlessness, cutting the need for people to review toxic content.
• Claude trained this way got better at handling adversarial prompts without becoming less helpful, and the approach makes the values steering the model's outputs more transparent.
• The constitution draws on sources like the UN Declaration of Human Rights and other labs' safety practices, but Anthropic admits it's still skewed toward Western viewpoints and remains a work in progress shaped by trial and error.

The author compares Claude's Constitution with OpenAI's Model Spec, highlighting their differences and similarities in guiding AI behavior and values. The Claude Constitution emphasizes a more anthropomorphic approach, focusing on the model's ethical practice and personality while addressing concerns about human control and ethical decision-making. Despite some reservations about anthropomorphism, the author appreciates the document's thoughtful sections on honesty and ethical considerations.

• Claude's Constitution treats the model as a "potential subject" with "wellbeing" rather than just a tool, a deliberate anthropomorphizing choice that OpenAI's Model Spec avoids.
• An OpenAI alignment team member reviewing the document remains skeptical that anthropomorphism is the right framing for AI systems given how differently they operate from humans.
• Both documents converge on banning white lies and holding the AI to honesty standards stricter than typical human ethics.
• The Constitution's approach to weighing harm—judging actions by context and information available rather than applying rigid rules—is singled out as a particularly thoughtful piece of ethical design.