Frontier AI is the most important technology of our time. In just the past few years, AI capabilities have improved from amusing to awe-inspiring. These systems have begun pushing forward scientific fields such as mathematics, acting autonomously and through self-organization to accomplish difficult goals, and playing an essential role in the lives of hundreds of millions. The pace of progress does not seem set to slow down, and decisions about who bears the risks, who gets the benefits, and what institutions are necessary to govern advanced AI are the most important political issues today.
Many of the problems we face here are fundamentally constitutional, having to do with the basic structure and pattern of life together. AI governance is both concerned with concrete risks to human safety and also with how to ensure that AI advances in a way that is broadly good, responsive to the democratic will, and protective of the basic liberties that let people find their own best ways to live, alone and together. How do we distribute and balance power, so that catastrophic risks are prevented and so that no person, system, company, or party can predominate over others? What do governments or companies owe to citizens whose jobs are automated away and who then do not have the means to independently provide for themselves? Do AIs deserve membership in our political communities, or someday will they? If we do not make these decisions ourselves, they will be made for us, and often by people with personal rather than public interests at heart.
These days, we ask again “the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” And maybe today our questions are harder than those confronted by those who came before us, with greater forces at work in the world and the very definition of society stretching in the face of new intelligences beginning to act and be alongside us. These are constitutional considerations that sit at the heart of who we are and are becoming, and they are the subject of Model Constitution.
Our questions have answers, if we have the wit and the will to find them. I plan to dedicate the first substantive posts of Model Constitution to one of the most literal interpretations of its title: looking at Claude’s Constitution and the OpenAI Model Spec, the closest things we have to constitutional texts in frontier AI and documents that “constitute” their models. We’ll be looking into what these texts are, how they work, and what they might tell us about how power operates in the world of frontier AI. Legal and political theory have lots of questions for them and even some answers, though fewer than we’d hope.
To address constitutional AI governance, we must take the AI constitutions seriously, and ask what makes them legitimate; what rights they grant and with what remedies; who interprets and enforces them; if and how they interact with external institutions; and what they mean for the people and artificial intelligences they govern. Model Constitution will broaden to begin addressing a larger set of constitutional questions, having to do with how AI changes the distribution of power and the legitimacy of its exercise, the rights and obligations that we have and should have in this transformative time, and how existing institutions will engage with and affect AI and its governance.
Eventually, Model Constitution will host an actual model AI constitution, a document that is both a technical specification toward which to align advanced AI and a description of a political order through which to govern AI for broad benefit. The Model Constitution will be an exemplar and a point of comparison against which the constitutions of the AI companies can be considered. It will be able to interface with external checking and balancing institutions and integrate public deliberation in ways that company constitutions cannot. In collaboration with others, I hope to help advance the open science of technical AI governance through experiments run on the Model Constitution that align and then evaluate AI systems.
The Model Constitution will be mostly written from my perspective and with public engagement. I (and hopefully other interested people) will defend it and the views it takes. But the goal is not to provide a perfect target for alignment, only to provide a decent one that others can take as a model to help decide how to think about these difficult questions. I believe that through deliberation and research we can align AI for the public good, and I hope that this project will advance that program. Over time, I hope more people will join this effort, on both the political and technical sides, and I invite collaborators to reach out. Governance and alignment are both collective endeavors made up of particular perspectives, each person contributing what they know.
In that spirit, a brief word about myself and the vantage that I’ll be bringing to Model Constitution. I’m an Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Government and Policy, focusing on the governance of frontier AI. I was trained at Harvard Law School, where among other things I became interested in constitutional theory. I stumbled upon DALL-E 2 and then GPT-3 in the antediluvian days of 2022, and I’ve spent quite a lot of time since then learning about these new technologies, how they work, and what they mean.
Before law school, I taught debate to middle and high schoolers across China. Most of my time there was during COVID, so I got a close and personal look at technological governance, what it can do, and also the various ways that people circumvent, flout, and frustrate the rules imposed on them. Those experiences and many others, of governing and being governed, of what a good community can be for its members, and of how people can choose to live well together, form the basis of my interest in the institutions that we use to build our lives.
So how shall we constitute this world that we are creating together?
Very much agreed here about the importance of model specs / constitutions, looking forward to reading what you write here
Nick, I wonder if the deeper constitutional question is not what a constitution should instruct an AI to do, but what institutions should enable humans to do with and to an AI.
Claude’s Constitution and the Model Spec are important, but they remain instructional constitutions, not definitions of power shared among actual constituents or alternative loci of authority. These constitutions are written by the institution that controls the model, including input from humans of course but not beholden to them beyond the initial process. Real constitutional power live elsewhere: in permissions, data access, inference, defaults, incentives, auditability, override authority, and the ability to contest or exit. True power over AI would be full ownership rights over the data on which they are trained and deployed, a set of legal boundaries caught up in major litigation today and likely in perpetuity.
This is where I think alternative formulations of power and governance over AI like the civic.ai project offers an important extension. The goal should be governance, not a governor: AI ought to serve as bounded civic infrastructure that helps communities deliberate and coordinate while preserving their capacity to judge, contest, repair, refuse, and ultimately retire the system. Alignment becomes a process maintained through public governance rather than something solved inside the model.
A covenantal approach pushes this further. Constitutional legitimacy requires not merely participation, but continuing institutional agency: meaningful exit; a right to remain unseeable; stewardship rather than extraction of communal data; distributed authority; and auditable, reversible obligations. A community should retain the practical ability to say: not with this data; not under these terms; explain this; repair it; or we are leaving with our property. AI training founded on colonial capitalist principles of freewheeling theft and extraction (our behavioral patterns, sentiments, life histories, health data etc) should be forced to compete with alternative models governed in a manner which earns the trust to use the most valuable data there is: the record and testimony of each of us about what matters most to us; what we value.
That also makes civic skill itself a constitutional good. If AI increasingly mediates deliberation, we should ask whether it is strengthening people’s capacity to govern one another—or quietly replacing that capacity with automated judgment.
Perhaps, then, the most interesting Model Constitution would deliberately refuse to become the final authority. It would constitutionalize the capacity of communities to constitute and reconstitute their relationship with AI.
The test would not simply be whether the model has admirable principles, but whether, after deployment, humans still possess the skills and institutional power to notice when it is wrong, make the error legible, require correction, and make that correction consequential.
Build governance, not a governor.