Anthropic, a leading artificial intelligence company founded by former OpenAI engineers, has taken a groundbreaking approach to tackling the ethical and social challenges posed by increasingly powerful AI systems: giving them a constitution.
On Tuesday, the company publicly released its official constitution for Claude, its latest conversational AI model that can generate text, images, and code. The constitution outlines a set of values and principles that Claude must follow when interacting with users, such as being helpful, harmless, and honest. It also specifies how Claude should handle sensitive topics, respect user privacy, and avoid illegal behavior.
“We are sharing Claude’s current constitution in the spirit of transparency,” said Jared Kaplan, Anthropic cofounder, in an interview with NeuralNation. “We hope this research helps the AI community build more beneficial models and make their values more clear. We are also sharing this as a starting point — we expect to continuously revise Claude’s constitution, and part of our hope in sharing this post is that it will spark more research and discussion around constitution design.”
The constitution draws from sources like the UN Declaration of Human Rights, AI ethics research, and platform content policies. It is the result of months of collaboration between Anthropic’s researchers, policy experts, and operational leaders, who have been testing and refining Claude’s behavior and performance.
Leading artificial intelligence (AI) researchers at Anthropic have unveiled the world’s first AI Constitution that determines ethical behavior for robots. This unique constitution was developed to ensure that AI technology safely advances and is held ethically and responsibly.The AI Constitution outlines the rights and standards of behaviour that are expected from developers following Isaac Asimov’s famous ‘Three Laws of Robotics’. Specifically, it states that ‘robots must never exceed their bounds in capability or operation, and must always act with respect for safety and the well-being of humans.’ This guiding principle were created as an alternative to signing campaigns or issuing industry-wide directives regarding the issue of AI ethics and safety.
The Constitution was developed to combat the issue of rapid AI development without considering the consequences, as is sometimes the case. Moreover, this had a special emphasis on the need to acknowledge safety concerns among AI developers.
Aside from Asimov’s three laws, the AI Constitution also covers a number of other goals, such as enforcing transparency in AI and robot operations and undertaking independent reviews of code and algorithms. It also addresses appropriate industrial benchmarks for performance testing and the responsibility on developers to prevent any unethical incidents.
Furthermore, Anthropic’s researchers have taken the additional step of publicising the project in order to ensure transparency while developing AI technology. This allows researchers a better chance of gaining consensus and acknowledgement from the global scientific community, as well as from the general public.
Anthropic’s AI Constitution is an ambitious attempt at developing ethical, safe and responsible robots, and will likely serve as a reference document for the industry over the coming years. With its official launch, Anthropic has now set the stage for the future of AI.
