Anthropic, an AI company founded by former OpenAI engineers, has developed a novel approach to promoting ethical and responsible AI development: an AI constitution for its Claude conversational AI model. The constitution outlines Claude’s values and principles for interacting with users, such as being helpful, harmless, and honest. It also defines how Claude should handle more sensitive topics, protect user privacy, and avoid illegal behavior.
Anthropic hopes the publication of their constitution will inspire other AI developers to adopt similar practices and standards, and promote trust and transparency in the AI field. Such trust is especially needed in the face of controversies regarding AI biases, misinformation, and manipulation. Anthropic has created a reliable, steerable AI system in part due to its constitution and its ability to learn from human feedback.
Claudia is Anthropic’s flagship product, with planned applications such as education, entertainment, and social good. It can generate poetry, stories, code, and more, in addition to assisting users with optimizing and improving their content. The company has also incorporated principles from the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and best practices from digital platform content policies.
The launch of Anthropic’s constitution symbolizes the increasing urgency of addressing complex ethical questions regarding AI systems that are becoming more autonomous. This initiative, along with Constitutional AI, offers a promising path towards building beneficial AI models that align with human ethics.
Anthropic is committed to keeping the constitution up to date as new ethical values and societal norms emerge, and is continuously testing and refining Claude’s behavior and performance. The company also welcomes feedback and research on refining the constitution and providing more input on constitutional design.
Anthropic is a startup specializing in creating general AI systems and language models that can perform tasks from multiple domains. Founded in 2021, the company is on a mission to ensure AI helps people and society thrive. It raised over $124 million in its series A funding round. Led by co-founder Jared Kaplan and his team, Anthropic is driven to building solutions for AI ethics, safety, and security.
