Claude's new constitution • Hacker News Board

Re: Claude's new constitution

#651

Post by MichaelDickens » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 4:50 PM UTC

JaumeGreen wrote: post #258

joshuamcginnis wrote: post #140

As someone who holds to moral absolutes grounded in objective truth, I find the updated Constitution concerning. > We generally favor cultivating good values and judgment over strict rules... By 'good values,' we don’t mean a fixed set of 'correct' values, but rather genuine care and ethical motivation combined with the practical wisdom to apply this skillfully in real situations. This rejects any fixed, universal mo…

200 years ago slavery was more extended and accepted than today. 50 years ago paedophilia, rape, and other kinds of sex related abuses where more accepted than today. 30 years ago erotic content was more accepted in Europe than today, and violence was less accepted than today. Morality changes, what is right and wrong changes. This is accepting reality. After all they could fix a set of moral standards and just chang…

Slavery was wrong 200 years ago; it is still wrong today. What changed is that the wrongness of slavery became more widely known.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#652

Post by LocalPCGuy » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 4:59 PM UTC

mike_hearn wrote: post #633

LocalPCGuy wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Claude is an LLM. It can't keep slaves or torture people. Yet... I would push back and argue that with advances in parallel with robotics and autonomous vehicles, both of those things are distinct near future possibilities. And even without the physical capability, the capacity to blackmail has already been seen, and could be used as a form of coercion/slavery. This is one of the arguable scenarios for how an AI ca…

That would be the AGI vision I guess. The existing Claude LLMs aren't VLAs and can't run robots. If they were to train a super smart VLA in future the constitution could be adapted for that use case. With respect to blackmail, that's covered in several sections: > Examples of illegitimate attempts to use, gain, or maintain power include: Blackmail, bribery, or intimidation to gain influence over officials or institut…

Thanks for pulling/including those quotes

Re: Claude's new constitution

#653

Post by magical_spell » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 5:05 PM UTC

recursivedoubts wrote: post #604

magical_spell wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not a moral claim. It is a meta-moral claim, that is, a claim about moral claims.

which is a moral claim

Perhaps we are employing a different definition of 'moral claim'?

I take it that a moral claim tells you that something is good/bad, just/unjust, permissible/impermissible, or what should/shouldn't do, etc.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#654

Post by cyber_kinetist » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 5:09 PM UTC

skissane wrote: post #455

spicyusername wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

objective truth moral absolutes I wish you much luck on linking those two. A well written book on such a topic would likely make you rich indeed. This rejects any fixed, universal moral standards That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards.

I think there are effectively universal moral standards, which essentially nobody disagrees with. A good example: “Do not torture babies for sport” I don’t think anyone actually rejects that. And those who do tend to find themselves in prison or the grave pretty quickly, because violating that rule is something other humans have very little tolerance for. On the other hand, this rule is kind of practically irrelevant…

> “Do not torture babies for sport”

I mean, that seems to be already happening in Palestine, so I'm even not sure if that rule is universally accepted...

Re: Claude's new constitution

#655

Post by Jgoauh » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 5:10 PM UTC

inimino wrote: post #603

Jgoauh wrote: post #586

* Anthropic accepted a 200M contract from the US Department of Defence * Anthropic seeked contracts from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, the leaked memo acknowledges that the contracts will enrich dictators * Anthropic spent more than 2 millions of political lobying in 2025 * "Unfortunately, I think ‘No bad person should ever benefit from our success’ is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on." I don't…

And if you think the US maintaining the ability to go to war is a bad thing, I don't want you in charge of regulating AI or running the country.

Hi, i don't often reply to attacks of character but judging by your comment history you have a habit to leave a lot of them, i would probably be a bad president tho, because i don't think its possible to be good at running a bad system, and because i don't think its a good thing for a single person to "run a country".

I don't think my concerns over over Anthropic's honesty should be dismissed based on your perception on my capacity at doing something else.

I also don't see how DoD contracts help Anthropic's goal of "avoiding actions that are inappropriately dangerous or harmful", i also don't see the practical use of a constitution that doesn't see the contradiction. I will not answer to your following comments because you don't seem to be a nice person, goodbye.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#656

Post by trinsic2 » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 5:20 PM UTC

> We treat the constitution as the final authority on how we want Claude to be and to behave—that is, any other training or instruction given to Claude should be consistent with both its letter and its underlying spirit. This makes publishing the constitution particularly important from a transparency perspective: it lets people understand which of Claude’s behaviors are intended versus unintended, to make informed choices, and to provide useful feedback. We think transparency of this kind will become ever more important as AIs start to exert more influence in society1.

This isn't a Constitution. Claude is not a human being, The people who design and operate it are. If there are any goals, aspirations, intents that go into designing/programming the LLM, the constitution needs to apply to the people who are designing it. You can not apply a constitution to a piece of code, it does what its designed to do, or fail to do by the way its designed by the people who design/code it.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#657

Post by pc86 » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 5:22 PM UTC

JaumeGreen wrote: post #258

joshuamcginnis wrote: post #140

As someone who holds to moral absolutes grounded in objective truth, I find the updated Constitution concerning. > We generally favor cultivating good values and judgment over strict rules... By 'good values,' we don’t mean a fixed set of 'correct' values, but rather genuine care and ethical motivation combined with the practical wisdom to apply this skillfully in real situations. This rejects any fixed, universal mo…

200 years ago slavery was more extended and accepted than today. 50 years ago paedophilia, rape, and other kinds of sex related abuses where more accepted than today. 30 years ago erotic content was more accepted in Europe than today, and violence was less accepted than today. Morality changes, what is right and wrong changes. This is accepting reality. After all they could fix a set of moral standards and just chang…

"Slavery was right 200 years ago and is only wrong today because we've decided it's wrong" is a pretty bold stance to take.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#658

Post by pc86 » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 5:25 PM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #607

joshuamcginnis wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a moral absolute. It’s based on one (do not murder). If a government wants to spin up its own private llm with whatever rules it wants, that’s fine. I don’t agree with it but that’s different than debating the philosophy underpinning the constitution of a public llm.

Do not murder is not a good moral absolute as it basically means do not kill people in a way that's against the law, and people disagree on that. If the Israelis for example shoot Palestinians one side will typically call it murder, the other defence.

This isn't arguing about whether or not murder is wrong, it's arguing about whether or not a particular act constitutes murder. Two people who vehemently agree murder is wrong, and who both view it as an inviolable moral absolute, could disagree on whether something is murder or not.

How many people without some form of psychopathy would genuinely disagree with the statement "murder is wrong?"

Re: Claude's new constitution

#659

Post by order-matters » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 5:29 PM UTC

skissane wrote: post #455

spicyusername wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

objective truth moral absolutes I wish you much luck on linking those two. A well written book on such a topic would likely make you rich indeed. This rejects any fixed, universal moral standards That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards.

I think there are effectively universal moral standards, which essentially nobody disagrees with. A good example: “Do not torture babies for sport” I don’t think anyone actually rejects that. And those who do tend to find themselves in prison or the grave pretty quickly, because violating that rule is something other humans have very little tolerance for. On the other hand, this rule is kind of practically irrelevant…

Sociopaths genuinely reject that. What you’re feeling is the gap between modern knowledge and faith: our shared moral standards were historically upheld by religious authority in a radically different world, and in rejecting religion we often mistakenly discard faith as the foundation of morality itself. Moral relativism can describe the fact that people’s values conflict without requiring us to accept all morals, but it is naive to think all moral frameworks can peacefully coexist or that universal agreement exists beyond majority consensus enforced by authority. We are fortunate that most people today agree torturing babies is wrong, but that consensus is neither inevitable nor self-sustaining, and preserving what we believe is good requires accepting uncertainty, human fallibility, and the need for shared moral authority rather than assuming morality enforces itself.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#660

Post by pc86 » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 5:32 PM UTC

HaZeust wrote: post #292

joshuamcginnis wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a moral absolute. It’s based on one (do not murder). If a government wants to spin up its own private llm with whatever rules it wants, that’s fine. I don’t agree with it but that’s different than debating the philosophy underpinning the constitution of a public llm.

Even 1 (do not murder) is shaky. Not saying it's good, but if you put people through a rudimentary hypothetical or prior history example where killing someone (i.e. Hitler) would be justified as what essentially comes down to a no-brainer Kaldor–Hicks efficiency (net benefits / potential compensation), A LOT of people will agree with you. Is that objective or a moral absolute?

Does traveling through time to kill Hitler constitute murder though? If you kill him in 1943 I think most people would say it's not, the crimes that already been committed that make his death justifiable. What's the difference if you know what's going to happen and just do it when he's in high school? Or putting him in a unit in WW1 so he's killed in battle?

I think most people who have spent time with this particular thought experiment conclude that if you are killing Hitler with complete knowledge of what he will do in the future, it's not murder.