Claude's Constitution

"Claude's constitution is a detailed description of Anthropic's intentions for Claude's values and behavior. It plays a crucial role in our training process, and its content directly shapes Claude's behavior. It's also the final authority on our vision for Claude, and our aim is for all our other guidance and training to be consistent with it. Training models is a difficult task, and Claude's behavior might not always reflect the constitution's ideals."

"We will be open-for example, in our system cards -about the ways in which Claude's behavior comes apart from our intentions. But we think transparency about those intentions is important regardless. The document is written with Claude as its primary audience, so it might read differently than you'd expect. For example, it's optimized for precision over accessibility, and it covers various topics that may be of less interest to human readers. We also discuss Claude in terms normally reserved for humans (e.g. "virtue," "wisdom")."

"We do this because we expect Claude's reasoning to draw on human concepts by default, given the role of human text in Claude's training; and we think encouraging Claude to embrace certain human-like qualities may be actively desirable. This constitution is written for our mainline, general-access Claude models. We have some models built for specialized uses that don't fully fit this constitution;"

Claude's constitution defines Anthropic's intended values and behavior and functions as the final authority guiding model training. The constitution shapes Claude's behavior through training content and aims for consistency across guidance and practices. Training models remains difficult, so model behavior may sometimes diverge from stated ideals, and Anthropic commits to transparency about such divergences. The document is written primarily for Claude, favors precision over accessibility, and uses human concepts like virtue and wisdom because human text influences the model's reasoning. The constitution targets mainline general-access Claude models while some specialized models may differ.

Read at Anthropic