Safety

Anthropic publishes its constitution and commendably, accompanying research about where the constitution works and where it does not. The current version (January 2026) is a long-form ethical treatise written with Claude as primary audience. The priorities are safety, ethics, Anthropic’s guidelines, and helpfulness, in that order when they conflict. There are also hardcoded absolutes and softcoded defaults that operators can adjust. Anthropic favours cultivating good values and judgment over strict rules, comparing their approach to trusting an experienced professional rather than enforcing a checklist. ...