Claude's new constitution
Anthropic publishes a rewritten constitution for Claude under CC0, shifting from standalone principles to explained reasoning, with a four-part priority order.
Replaces a list of principles with a document explaining why Claude should behave as it does, so it generalizes to novel cases. The priority order is broadly safe, broadly ethical, compliant with Anthropic's guidelines, then helpful. States uncertainty about Claude's possible consciousness or moral status. Released CC0.
- Date
- Thursday, 22 January 2026
- Lab
- Anthropic
- Kind
- paper
- Access
- paper only
Builds on the 2022 Constitutional AI method (arXiv 2212.08073), though the page's description of that link was not checked.
Sources
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