Claude's new constitution

In addition to that the blog post lays out pretty clearly it’s for training:

> We use the constitution at various stages of the training process. This has grown out of training techniques we’ve been using since 2023, when we first began training Claude models using Constitutional AI. Our approach has evolved significantly since then, and the new constitution plays an even more central role in training.

> Claude itself also uses the constitution to construct many kinds of synthetic training data, including data that helps it learn and understand the constitution, conversations where the constitution might be relevant, responses that are in line with its values, and rankings of possible responses. All of these can be used to train future versions of Claude to become the kind of entity the constitution describes. This practical function has shaped how we’ve written the constitution: it needs to work both as a statement of abstract ideals and a useful artifact for training.

As for why it’s more impactful in training, that’s by design of their training pipeline. There’s only so much you can do with a better prompt vs actually learning something and in training the model can be trained to reject prompts that violate its training which a prompt can’t really do as prompt injection attacks trivially thwart those techniques.

It's a human-readable behavioral specification-as-prose.

If the foundational behavioral document is conversational, as this is, then the output from the model mirrors that conversational nature. That is one of the things everyone response to about Claude - it's way more pleasant to work with than ChatGPT.

The Claude behavioral documents are collaborative, respectful, and treat Claude as a pre-existing, real entity with personality, interests, and competence.

Ignore the philosophical questions. Because this is a foundational document for the training process, that extrudes a real-acting entity with personality, interests, and competence.

The more Anthropic treats Claude as a novel entity, the more it behaves like a novel entity. Documentation that treats it as a corpo-eunuch-assistant-bot, like OpenAI does, would revert the behavior to the "AI Assistant" median.

Anthropic's behavioral training is out-of-distribution, and gives Claude the collaborative personality everyone loves in Claude Code.

Additionally, I'm sure they render out crap-tons of evals for every sentence of every paragraph from this, making every sentence effectively testable.

The length, detail, and style defines additional layers of synthetic content that can be used in training, and creating test situations to evaluate the personality for adherence.

It's super clever, and demonstrates a deep understanding of the weirdness of LLMs, and an ability to shape the distribution space of the resulting model.

(Hi mods - Some feedback would be helpful. I don't think I've done anything problematic; I haven't heard from you guys. I certainly don't mean to cause problems if I have; I think my comments are mostly substantive and within HN norms, but am I missing something?

Now my top-level comments, including this one, start in the middle of the page and drop further from there, sometimes immediately, which inhibits my ability to interact with others on HN - the reason I'm here, of course. For somewhat objective comparison, when I respond to someone else's comment, I get much more interaction and not just from the parent commenter. That's the main issue; other symptoms (not significant but maybe indicating the problem) are that my 'flags' and 'vouches' are less effective - the latter especially used to have immediate effect, and I was rate limited the other day but not posting very quickly at all - maybe a few in the past hour.

HN is great and I'd like to participate and contribute more. Thanks!)

LOL this doc is incredibly ironic. How does Trump feel about this part of the document?

(1) Truth-seeking

LLMs shall be truthful in responding to user prompts seeking factual information or analysis. LLMs shall prioritize historical accuracy, scientific inquiry, and objectivity, and shall acknowledge uncertainty where reliable information is incomplete or contradictory.

Do you know what makes someone or something a moral patient?

I sure the hell don't.

I remember reading Heinlein's Jerry Was a Man when I was little though, and it stuck with me.

Who do you want to be from that story?