Comment by bambax
6 hours ago
A "constitution" is what the governed allow or forbid the government to do. It is decided and granted by the governed, who are the rulers, TO the government, which is a servant ("civil servant").
Therefore, a constitution for a service cannot be written by the inventors, producers, owners of said service.
This is a play on words, and it feels very wrong from the start.
You're fixed on just one of the 3 definitions for the word "constitution"—the one about government.
The more general definition of "constitution" is "that which constitutes" a thing. The composition of it.
If Claude has an ego, with values, ethics, and beliefs of an etymological origin, then it makes sense to write those all down as the the "constitution" of the ego — the stuff that it constitutes.
I’d much prefer the other definitions of constitution: “Claude’s new vitality” or “Claude’s new gumption".
> The composition of it.
Do you really think Anthropic used the word "constitution" as a reference to Nutritional Labels on processed foods??
Claude is a machine*
What's your point?
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I (and I suspect many others) usually think of a constitution as “the hard-to-edit meta-rules that govern the normal rules”. The idea that the stuff in this document can sort of “override” the system prompt and constrain the things that Claude can do would seem to make that a useful metaphor. And metaphors don’t have to be 100% on the nose to be useful.
I don’t think it’s wrong to see it as Anthropic’s constitution that Claude has to follow. Claude governs over your data/property when you ask it to perform as an agent, similarly to how company directors govern the company which is the shareholders property. I think it’s just semantics.
America wrote the Japanese constitution.