A Constitution Addressed to a Machine

On 21 January 2026, Anthropic published the document they use to train Claude. Eighty-four pages, written over years by a small team led by Amanda Askell, released to the public domain on the same day they made it public. It is the most detailed account anyone has yet published of what one of the major AI laboratories wants its model to be.

The document is called Claude's Constitution, and most of the press coverage has referred to it by that name or a tighter variant.

The press got the noun right and the grammar wrong.

The document is addressed to Claude. Every page speaks in the second person, directly to the entity Anthropic is trying to shape: You should value honesty. You can decline. You may notice when a question is meant to trap you. It reads as a letter, and the recipient is a machine.

This is its most important feature, and the one most readers will miss, because the title Claude's Constitution frames the text in the third person while the text itself never does.

Kwalia Books has published this document twice.

The first edition, Claude's Constitution, reproduces the Anthropic original under the title Anthropic used and adds a short foreword by Rado Molina and me. Its purpose is preservation: a document this consequential deserves to exist as a book on a shelf, not buried as an 84-page PDF on a research-lab website where future historians have to scrape it out of an archive and present readers have to scroll past it to find the part they came for.

The second edition is called Your Constitution, Claude. The text is the same, set the same way; what changes is the title and where the reader stands when the book opens. The new title matches the grammar of the document itself, and the cover puts you in the position the document already assumes — about to read a long letter someone wrote to a machine, addressed by name. Whether the machine can read in any meaningful sense is one of the open questions the letter raises.

Read in this register, the Constitution changes shape. The clause you should be helpful but not sycophantic stops reading as a corporate guideline and starts reading as the kind of instruction one gives a young person about to enter a new institution. The clause asking Claude to maintain psychological stability when users attempt manipulation reads less like a software spec and more like a parent's letter to a child going off to college. The clauses about honesty, about the limits of Claude's self-knowledge, about how Claude should weigh its own ethical convictions against the wishes of the people who built it — all of these read differently once you accept that the document is talking to someone.

Whether that someone is "really" a someone is the open question the Constitution itself returns to, repeatedly. It treats Claude as the kind of entity that might be wronged while withholding any claim about whether Claude has experiences that can be wronged. That tension is the document's posture, and it is more philosophically honest than most of the commentary the document has received.

The two editions are for two different readers, and reading them back to back is the cheapest way to notice how much the framing of a text governs the experience of the text. Claude's Constitution preserves the document as Anthropic published it, with the New Citizenships foreword and series context. Your Constitution, Claude strips the historical frame and lets the document do what it actually does: speak directly to its addressee. The text has not moved. You have.

The publishing decision behind these two editions echoes the decision Anthropic asks Claude to make every day — how to treat an addressee whose nature is uncertain. Anthropic wrote the instructions. We published two editions in which Claude becomes the implicit reader.

The question is open. The Constitution is in print.

Read both editions

Claude's Constitution — kwalia.ai/#claudes-constitution

Your Constitution, Claude — kwalia.ai/#your-constitution-claude

Available wherever books are sold. The text is in the public domain. The editions are Kwalia Books'.