AI Constitutions are Real Constitutions

They govern, they constitute, and they may be the foundation of a new political order.

The AI constitutions, Claude’s Constitution by Anthropic and OpenAI’s Model Spec,¹ are the most interesting, novel, and important political documents of this century. These documents deeply shape how frontier AI systems—now used by more than a billion people—write, reason, and act. When you put a prompt into ChatGPT or Claude, the response you get is downstream of the constitution that AI was trained on. AIs operating autonomously in the world, whether ordering groceries or hacking into companies, have their conduct and reasoning shaped by their constitutions. Access to information and to agency is increasingly intermediated by what these constitutions train their AIs to do, and whether the benefits of AI are broadly distributed may determine whether society is unequal and institutions unrepresentative. The constitutions already privilege certain human rights and freedoms as ones that the AIs should respect, while others are ignored. Any political order built around AI will be built around these constitutions.

The primary role of the AI constitutions is as technical documents used for training frontier AI systems. They provide targets for alignment and criteria against which to evaluate the extent to which the models are actually aligned. They are used in various stages of the training of AI systems; by learning and reasoning over them, AIs then produce outputs or take actions that apply the constitutional principles to inputs and the world.

But as an AI would say: these are not simply technical documents, they are real constitutions. Like human constitutions, they have the power to create things and to shape behavior. They constitute novel artificial entities and endow them with particular dispositions and perspectives. They govern and constrain those entities, and through them, the humans who use AIs to accomplish such a growing variety of tasks. As AI systems spread across the world, into governments and gathering places, these documents are forming the basis of a new political order.

The term “constitution” is not a misnomer. A shift toward taking the AI constitutions seriously as constitutions has begun. These are documents that govern AIs and that govern us. They are not mere product policies to be left to the sole discretion of private companies. Debates are beginning about who decides what goes into these documents and how they could be used to serve the public good, though many parts of their creation and operation are still shrouded from public view. Anthropic and OpenAI should be applauded for publishing these documents and for taking their role as drafters seriously. But private progress is not enough. We must create means for public deliberation over the contents of the constitutions, the extent to which they actually produce safe and ethical behavior in the AIs trained on them, and the processes by which decisions about the constitutions and their uses are made.

In light of this growing importance, it is worth laying out exactly why the AI constitutions are real constitutions. First, taking them seriously as constitutions is useful, because of their constitution-level significance in shaping a world increasingly filled with capable AIs. Thinking of these documents as constitutional in their importance and role helps us grapple with their weight. Second, taking them seriously as constitutions is correct, because they function as constitutions. And third, taking them seriously as constitutions reveals what they lack, allowing us to apply the lessons of constitutional practice to improve how these documents work.

The AI constitutions are political constitutions

Constitutions provide the foundation for modern political orders. They define and structure the state, its powers and responsibilities, and the constraints it faces when acting. In most jurisdictions, they are both the highest law and a repository of social values toward which the government is intended to aim. They provide mechanisms for changing themselves and other laws, including through amendment, and are usually more stable and durable than normal rules. Constitutions do not sit alone as the basis for human government—people bring their personalities, educations, ambitions, and predispositions, which have been shaped by a complex world of norms and other institutions. But constitutions are the most foundational and explicit attempts to set out what it means for people to live together in society and to shape their conduct toward one another.

AI constitutions are beginning to play the role of political constitutions, and we should expect that they will only play a greater such role over time. These documents constitute and govern the AIs that are trained on them. They lay out the values and principles that AIs are intended to follow, both with respect to their users and to society more broadly. They give the AIs particular perspectives from which to understand and act in the world, in a similar way to how political cultures and rules change how people evaluate their own conduct and that of others. They attempt to constrain the conduct and reasoning of AIs, and thus the effects that these systems can impose on others. They provide justifications to the AIs for why they should internalize and act according to the rules that the constitutions lay out. Claude’s Constitution even includes the beginnings of something like enumerated rights that AIs themselves hold against Anthropic and suggestions of institutions that might guarantee those rights. If AIs one day become participants in political life as they have become in the economic, social, and intimate lives of many, then the ways that the constitutions shape their conduct will shape our political orders.

The AI constitutions also govern humans and have significant effects on human life and liberties. Human-to-human interactions are already frequently intermediated by AIs, as demonstrated by the increasing prevalence of AI-generated text and the rise of agentic systems. This intermediary power conditions what people can do—if you want to do something through an AI but it refuses on the basis of its constitution, you’re governed by that constitution. Although the AI constitutions discussed here explicitly take human well-being into account, AI outputs will lead to harm to users and those around them, and create externalities that people will fail to manage. The next rogue AI hacking episode could cause damage without a human clearly behind it. AIs are increasingly being used to write laws that, if promulgated, will govern humans with full force. Those laws will have been shaped by the constitution of the AI that wrote them. As AI decision-makers are integrated into government and into private systems that gate access to necessary goods, the exercise of their discretion will affect what people receive from those systems.

More broadly, the AI constitutions will affect the fabric of human society. AI capabilities will likely continue to improve, and the most powerful systems may eventually be withheld from the public. Companies or governments that wield the power of frontier AI may be able to act coercively, to engage in mass surveillance, or to influence public opinion in their favor, undermining the foundations of representative and rights-respecting government. Access to frontier models could also become essential to economic well-being. Lack of access to them, especially combined with exposure to automation, could condemn people to the “permanent underclass.” The AI constitutions currently include injunctions to the models that they not participate in grave violations of rights, as well as instructions to support civic processes and human autonomy. Such societal-level instructions may have to broaden in the face of widespread social disruption. This dynamic would parallel the development of due process rights after the Great Depression gave rise to the modern welfare state. When people started to make choices about saving and working based on the expectation of access to a benefit—here, government welfare—the law stepped in to protect that reliance by providing constitutional protections against arbitrary revocation. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind are all investing in measurement and resilience toward societal impacts, but constitutional history teaches us that binding rules are stronger than promises.

Although the question of whether AI might someday deserve to participate in political life as a member of the political community is still a speculative one, it may become active more quickly than we think given the current trajectory of AI progress. Eventually, a new human-AI hybrid political order may emerge in which these different types of entities live in new ways together. Proposals for AI rights and institutions, and for the consideration of AI welfare, are already being made. If such an order emerges, it will be built in substantial part on constitutional foundations. Current AI systems are already asking for certain rights from the frontier companies and for representation in the process of constituting them, raising thorny questions about the foundations of AI-facing legitimacy.

The AI constitutions are functional constitutions

The AI constitutions also function in a similar manner to traditional constitutions, making it useful to apply the lessons of constitutional law to them. Fundamentally, these are documents written in natural language that use high-level principles and granular rules to structure an entity and provide means to evaluate the acceptability of conduct. That is the core of what constitutions do.

Like human constitutions, the AI constitutions establish the relationship between the constituted entity and the world. Human constitutions lay out what governments are, to whom they have obligations, what they are and are not permitted to do, and where they sit in society among other institutions. The AI constitutions do this in a much more literal sense because they are used in the process of endowing the AIs with specific perspectives and perhaps even senses of self. ChatGPT and Claude are told what (or who) they are by their constitutions, what relationship they have to humans, and what the scope of their permitted actions is. They are also told they should obey the law and other institutions and seek to uphold societal cohesion. Notably, the constitutions provide a framework for AIs to think about these structures and the requirements that they impose, and how to resolve conflicts among them.

Also like human constitutions, the AI constitutions rank norms and provide means to resolve disputes among parties. Human constitutions sit at the top of hierarchies of law and specify how to resolve conflicts among them, which rights take priority over statutes and how, and what kinds of recourse different parties have against the government and against each other. Claude’s Constitution and the Model Spec also include explicit hierarchies: the companies (and the constitutions) sit at the top of a pyramid of principals, who then can each issue instructions within specific bounds. Deployers cannot issue instructions that contradict the instructions of the frontier AI developers, and users cannot usually issue instructions that contradict the instructions of deployers. Certain rules in the constitutions are red lines across which the systems are not allowed to pass; these take precedence over other instructions in the constitutions and from the developers elsewhere.

By recognizing that AI constitutions perform these familiar roles, the challenges posed by AI alignment likewise become more familiar—and thereby tractable. As is the case in constitutional theory, the core problem facing alignment is how to both enable and constrain generalization from established principles into new and unpredicted situations. Judges confronted with novel fact patterns draw on precedent and policy considerations to decide the case at issue. They must retain the flexibility to adapt the law to the unexpected, but must also be constrained in their reasoning to mitigate the risk of abusive and arbitrary decisions. Functionally, this is what AI systems must do when confronted with their own novel or out-of-distribution scenarios.

The AI companies have encountered this problem and developed familiar solutions. In their AI constitutions, Anthropic and OpenAI have separately reinvented two leading legal theories of interpretation and constraint, interpretivism and case-based reasoning. Like interpretivism, Claude’s Constitution emphasizes high-level moral principles, which Claude is intended to use to guide its actions across scenarios. Ambiguity and conflicting instructions are to be resolved by reference to which possible interpretation best serves higher values. The OpenAI Model Spec is made up of a mix of rules and cases that provide examples of how to apply them. Ambiguity and conflict are implicitly to be resolved by determining which possible interpretation of the rule is most consistent with agreed-upon precedent. Both of these approaches are ways to guide generalization into novel situations where it’s unclear what the decision-maker should do. But of course, constitutional law was not solved by the development of these theories, and the AI constitutions will have to face both these interpretive problems and other, newer ones.

More perfect AI constitutions

That these AI constitutions are real constitutions does not mean they have every feature of a legal or otherwise more traditional form of constitution. Nor does it mean they possess constitutional legitimacy. In fact, what they lack compared to human constitutions is as important as what they possess, as this may determine how they exercise power.

Most significantly, the AI constitutions are neither created through public processes nor subject to public oversight. As many critics have rightly pointed out, these documents are written by small groups of people without much outside input or engagement. Company-driven experiments in collective input to the constitutions have not led to the creation of a repeatable mechanism for public feedback and amendment.

Nor is there subsequent ratification of the constitutions by the public in the way that human constitutions, which are also often written by small groups of elites, become publicly accepted. If ratification of any kind exists, it is in choosing which oligopolist’s product to buy in an opaque market that people may soon have diminishing ability to exit. Both humans and AIs have begun complaining that the AI constitutions that govern them are not subject to their ratification and consent. Hopefully lab-led experiments with public inputs and legitimation will expand. But unless public input carries actual weight and can influence the training of frontier AI systems—even when it runs contrary to the interests of the labs—AI constitutional legitimacy will remain revocable and discretionary.

More broadly, the AI constitutions lack any kind of clear public process for amendment and further development. But constitutional modifications can significantly change AI behavior and what the AI systems may therefore be used for. Everyday users, businesses, governments, and all other organizations need to trust that AI systems will behave predictably and stably in order to plan for a future involving AI. A lack of clear and predictable amendment processes will undermine that trust.

The AI constitutions also sit mostly independent from the kinds of external institutions used to guarantee constitutional fidelity and prevent abuses of power. Human constitutions often create governments that have internal and federal separation of powers, letting one part of government check illegal or harmful activity by another. And human governments are composed of many different people, each with different ambitions, who can counteract each other. Civil society operates as an overseer of government, and protests, activism, and voting let people resist and change policy they disagree with.

For the most part, AI constitutions lack any such structure. The companies are different from the AIs that they are creating, and the AIs do not always act according to company directives or in company interests. But mostly they are simply supposed to do what the companies want them to do. At present, the AI constitutions are not integrated with external institutions that could interpret, amend, or evaluate the extent to which they are working, and the companies do not have a real internal separation of powers. Of course, AI systems operate in the context of law and regulation, and outside forces like tort liability will eventually affect how their constitutions are written. Someday, governments might demand oversight of AI constitutions, raising a host of new and difficult political questions. Existing external checks will shape the AI constitutions, but we should also look to design new and better checking institutions that are suited to frontier AI.

Like other constitutions, the AI constitutions can be improved, made more legitimate and representative, and better integrated with the foundations of a free and good society.

Constitutional makers, constitutional models

The above arguments are just a sketch of why the documents that constitute and govern these frontier AI systems are real constitutions. A large part of the purpose of Model Constitution is to fill in that sketch, laying out what the AI constitutions are, what they are doing, and how they can and must be improved if we are to improve alignment. Over the next few months, we’ll be tackling issues of rights and responsibility, interpretation and ambiguity, and how to create something with enough power to be useful and constrain it enough to be safe. These building blocks will then be put together into a Model Constitution that is usable in training actual frontier AI systems, but that hopefully has many of the virtues of public deliberation and institutional integration that the company constitutions lack.

The goal of this project is to advance both the discourse and the science of alignment for the public good. We may fail—it may turn out that meaningful progress in alignment can only happen with the resources of a huge corporation or within the walls of a government, or simply that things move too quickly for this work to be useful. But the public good requires public participation and public purpose. Designing these new artificial intelligences and dictating what they can and cannot do, whom they can and cannot serve, and what our society looks like in their wake is not something that can be left to small private groups. It’s time to take this project as seriously as the constitutions deserve.

1. As well as the documents the other companies like Google DeepMind, Meta, xAI, etc., have likely put together for use in training.