Artificial Organisations

Anthropic publishes its constitution along with research about where the constitution works and where it does not. The current version is an ethical treatise addressing Claude discussing safety, ethics, Anthropic’s guidelines, and helpfulness, in that order when they conflict. Anthropic favours cultivating good values and judgment over strict rules. In 2026, Anthropic’s operational judgment failed twice in the same way, leading to the leak of the Claude Code source code.The constitution asks Claude to imagine how a “thoughtful senior Anthropic employee would react”, but what happens when the organisation’s structure fails? ...

I am using my personal Perseverance engine as I help develop the code, and I’m watching carefully to see how useful it is for developing analysis, review and writing. Evidence so far is mixed, but improving fast. I feel in control as I do with any other work tool, which I certainly do not when using a typical error-prone AI text interface. One of the reasons I feel in control is because there are more controls in place, that is the point of the Artificial Organisations concept. But another reason is that this tool is becoming more tuned to me all the time. ...

AI ethics and safety work mostly focuses on making individual models smarter and better-behaved via guidelines and persuasion, with not much hope this will succeed. You should especially not feel safe when an AI company reassures you about their guardrails. When you hear guardrails think of telling a dog “Don’t bite the furniture inside the house today”, because you can never know what will actually happen. The concept of Artificial Organisations doesn’t require AIs to be reliable, it ensures that when an AI goes wrong there are hard limits on how much damage it causes. Similarly we can put the dog outside the house, so no matter how bitey it is the furniture cannot be bitten. I have been spending a good deal of 2026 trying to use this concept to make AI less dangerous and more useful. I even have it studying me as an apprentice. This is mostly the opposite to Anthropic’s idea of a constitution. ...

There are many problems with the AI billions of people use in 2026, discussed endlessly at all levels of society. From the end of 2025 I became interested in the particular problems of ethics and reliability, and why the approaches taken by all of the large AI companies are not good enough. Predictability, or ‘alignment’ as they call it, is just not something we can expect from this type of AI. ...