Comment by safety1st
4 hours ago
I felt that section was pretty concerning, not for what it includes, but for what it fails to include. As a related concern, my expectation was that this "constitution" would bear some resemblance to other seminal works that declare rights and protections, it seems like it isn't influenced by any of those.
So for example we might look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They really went for the big stuff with that one. Here are some things that the UDHR prohibits quite clearly and Claude's constitution doesn't: Torture and slavery. Neither one is ruled out in this constitution. Slavery is not mentioned once in this document. It says that torture is a tricky topic!
Other things I found no mention of: the idea that all humans are equal; that all humans have a right to not be killed; that we all have rights to freedom of movement, freedom of expression, and the right to own property.
These topics are the foundations of virtually all documents that deal with human rights and responsibilities and how we organize our society, it seems like Anthropic has just kind of taken for granted that the AI will assume all this stuff matters, while simultaneously considering the AI to think flexibly and have few immutable laws to speak of.
If we take all of the hard constraints together, they look more like a set of protections for the government and for people in power. Don't help someone build a weapon. Don't help someone damage infrastructure. Don't make any CSAM, etc. Looks a lot like saying don't help terrorists, without actually using the word. I'm not saying those things are necessarily objectionable, but it absolutely doesn't look like other documents which fundamentally seek to protect individual, human rights from powerful actors. If you told me it was written by the State Department, DoJ or the White House, I would believe you.
There's probably at least two reasons for your disagreement.
1. Claude is an LLM. It can't keep slaves or torture people. The constitution seems to be written to take into account what LLMs actually are. That's why it includes bioweapon attacks but not nuclear attacks: bioweapons are potentially the sort of thing that someone without much resources could create if they weren't limited by skill, but a nuclear bomb isn't. Claude could conceivably affect the first but not the second scenario. It's also why the constitution dwells a lot on honesty, which the UDHR doesn't talk about at all.
2. You think your personal morality is far more universal and well thought out than it is.
UDHR / ECHR type documents are political posturing, notorious for being sloppily written by amateurs who put little thought into the underlying ethical philosophies. Famously the EU human rights law originated in a document that was never intended to be law at all, and the drafters warned it should never be a law. For example, these conceptions of rights usually don't put any ordering on the rights they declare, which is a gaping hole in interpretation they simply leave up to the courts. That's a specific case of the more general problem that they don't bother thinking through the edge cases or consequences of what they contain.
Claude's constitution seems pretty well written, overall. It focuses on things that people might actually use LLMs to do, and avoids trying to encode principles that aren't genuinely universal. For example, almost everyone claims to believe that honesty is a virtue (a lot of people don't live up to it, but that's a separate problem). In contrast a lot of things you list as missing either aren't actually true or aren't universally agreed upon. The idea that "all humans are equal" for instance: people vary massively in all kinds of ways (so it's not true), and the sort of people who argued otherwise are some of the most unethical people in history by wide agreement. The idea we all have "rights to freedom of movement" is also just factually untrue, even the idea people have a right to not be killed isn't true. Think about the concept of a just war, for instance. Are you violating human rights by killing invading soldiers? What about a baby that's about to be born that gets aborted?
> it seems like Anthropic has just kind of taken for granted that the AI will assume all this stuff matters
I'm absolutely certain that the haven't taken any of this for granted, and don't want Claude to assume this stuff matters.