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Anthropic is stuck in a paradox: among the best AI companies, it… The most obsessed Goodbye and leads the group in researching how the models went wrong. But even though Safety issues Determined that it is far from a solution, Anthropic is pushing as aggressively as its competitors toward the next, and potentially more dangerous, level of artificial intelligence. Its primary task is to figure out how to resolve this contradiction.
Last month, Anthropic released two documents that acknowledged the risks associated with the path it’s on and hinted at the path it could take to escape the paradox. “Technology adolescence“, a long-running blog written by CEO Dario Amodei, is nominally about “confronting and overcoming the dangers of powerful AI,” but it spends more time talking about the former than the latter. Amodei tactfully describes the challenge as “apocalyptic,” but his depiction of the dangers of AI—made more dire, he notes, by the high potential for the technology to be misused by autocrats—is a contrast to his earlier, more optimistic Primitive Fantasy article.”Machines of loving grace“.
This post talked about a nation of data center geniuses; The final message evokes “endless black seas.” Deportation Dante! However, after more than 20,000 mostly bleak words, Amodei ultimately struck a tone of optimism, saying that even in the darkest of circumstances, it was humanity that always triumphed.
The second Anthropic document published in January, “Claude Constitution“, focuses on how this trick is accomplished. The text is technically directed at one audience: Claude himself (as well as future versions of the chatbot). It’s an interesting document, revealing Anthropic’s vision of how Claude, and perhaps his AI peers, should deal with the world’s challenges. Bottom line: Anthropic plans to rely on Claude himself to untie her company’s Gordian knot.
Anthropic market recognition has long been a technique called Constitutional artificial intelligence. It is a process through which its models adhere to a set of principles that align their values with sound human ethics. Claude’s initial constitution contained a number of documents meant to embody those values — things like SPARROW (a set of anti-racism and anti-violence statements created by DeepMind), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and Apple’s Terms of Service (!). The 2026 updated version is different: it’s more like a long prompt outlining the moral framework that Claude will follow, discovering the best path to righteousness on his own.
Amanda Askill, Ph.D., who was the lead author of this review, explains that the anthropic approach is more powerful than simply requiring Claude to follow a set of stated rules. “If people follow rules for no other reason than they exist, it’s often worse than if you understood why the rule exists,” Askell explains. The constitution states that Claude must exercise “independent judgment” when faced with situations that require balancing his powers of assistance, safety, and honesty.
Here’s how the Constitution puts it: “While we want Claude to be rational and rigorous when thinking clearly about ethics, we also want Claude to be intuitively sensitive to a wide range of considerations and able to weigh those considerations quickly and reasonably in the process of living decision-making.” Intuitively It’s a telling word choice here – the assumption seems to be that there’s more under Claude’s hood than just an algorithm that picks out the next word. The Claude Foundation, as one might call it, also expresses the hope that the chatbot will be able to “increasingly draw on its wisdom and understanding.”
wisdom? Sure, a lot of people take advice from big language models, but it’s another thing to acknowledge that those algorithmic machines actually have the gravitas associated with such a term. Askell doesn’t back down when I ask. “I think Claude is definitely capable of a certain kind of wisdom,” she told me.