What Is Constitutional AI and Why Does Anthropic Keep Talking About It?

Anthropic, the company behind Claude, talks constantly about "Constitutional AI." It sounds like marketing jargon, but it represents a genuinely different approach to AI safety that affects how their models behave.

Traditional AI training uses human feedback—people rate outputs and the model learns from those ratings. The problem is humans are inconsistent, expensive, and bring their own biases. Constitutional AI adds a layer: train the AI to evaluate its own outputs against a set of principles (the "constitution"), then use that self-evaluation to improve.

In practice, this means Claude tends to be more consistent in its refusals and explanations. It's less likely to be "jailbroken" because the safety principles are embedded in how the model thinks, not just bolted on. The tradeoff is sometimes excessive caution—Claude refuses things that GPT attempts. Whether that's a feature or a bug depends on your use case.