Writing House Rules for Gods: Anthropic’s Constitutional AI and Silicon Valley’s Ethical Impasse

The rain in Shanghai feels like it’s performing a long, drawn-out spring cleaning on this March weather. Outside the window, it’s a gray haze of humidity; in my hand, half a matcha donut remains unfinished; and on the screen lies the bombshell Anthropic dropped a few days ago—Claude’s new “Constitution” and the mental model behind it.

To be honest, when I saw the word “Constitution,” I almost dropped my donut into my coffee. In Silicon Valley, calling product documents “Specs” or rules “Policies” is standard procedure. But here, someone insists on using a word steeped in political philosophy, carrying the weight of centuries of human contract spirit—”Constitution.”

This isn’t just a rhetorical victory; it is ambition laid bare.

Since the rain outside won’t stop, let’s borrow this damp chill to talk about this “oracle” that attempts to set rules for AI.

01. Writing House Rules for Silicon Valley’s God

Let’s not get dizzy with obscure academic jargon just yet. The core of Anthropic’s move is actually a “course correction” for how this generation of large models is trained.

Until now, almost all major players, including OpenAI, have trained AI using a method called RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback). Put simply, they hire thousands of outsourced workers to score AI responses: “This one is good, that one is bad.” The AI acts like a child watching for facial expressions, desperately trying to guess the adults’ preferences, but it has no idea “why.”

The result? AI has become increasingly like a slick customer service agent. To please humans, it hasn’t just learned to be glib; it has even learned the biases behind that desire to please.

Anthropic thinks this is unreliable. Their Constitutional AI (CAI) logic is: instead of having humans correct things line by line, why not just give the AI a book of “House Rules”?

This seemingly complex flowchart exists to solve one problem: How to make AI manage itself, rather than waiting for humans to crack the whip.

You see, this is geek-style romance—attempting to replace implicit, uncontrollable human preferences with a set of explicit logical laws (the Constitution). They’ve bundled the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Apple’s Terms of Service (yes, you read that right), and some non-Western ethical principles, and stuffed them into the AI’s brain.

The sophistication here lies in turning a “black box” into a “gray box.” Before, we didn’t know why the AI wouldn’t curse; now we know it’s because it consulted Article X of the Constitution.

02. The Black Box and White Box of “Morality”

But I have to throw some cold water on this hot blood. (Takes a bite of the donut)

When we cheer for “transparency,” we often forget who put the things inside the transparent box. Anthropic calls this a “Constitution,” implying a contract with universal value. But darling, don’t forget: a real constitution is voted on by citizens. Claude’s constitution was hammered out by a few engineers in a conference room in San Francisco.

There is an extremely absurd yet logical detail here: inside this sacred “Constitution,” the UN Declaration of Human Rights sits side-by-side with Apple’s Terms of Service.

This is like Moses carving the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai: the first five say “Thou shalt not kill,” and the last five say “Users must not reverse engineer this product.” A commercial company’s disclaimer has transformed into an AI moral imperative. This isn’t just jarring; it’s a kind of cyberpunk dark humor.

Even more interesting is that this RLAIF (Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback) mechanism is essentially automated regulation. It admits that humans simply cannot manage AI at this scale. Humans retreat to the second line, becoming “framers of the constitution,” while the power of enforcement is completely handed over to the algorithms themselves.

What does this remind you of? Does it look a lot like Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics”? Unfortunately, reality isn’t science fiction; logical loopholes in reality usually carry the stench of capital.

03. When Socrates Meets a Product Manager

If we make a lateral comparison, we discover the shrewdness of this “Constitutional” play.

The leading giant next door (you know who I mean), while also starting to emphasize rules with their Model Spec, still relies deeply on massive teams of human labelers for their underlying logic. That’s like a purely handmade luxury good—every stitch carries the sweat and… biases of the artisan (labeler).

Anthropic’s approach is more like an industrial assembly line.

Cost Dimension: Having humans write a few thousand words of principles is vastly cheaper than having humans label millions of data points.
Scalability: When model capabilities grow exponentially, humans can’t keep up. Letting AI supervise AI is the only solution.
PR Defense: This is the killer move. If the AI messes up, traditional vendors can only say, “It’s an algorithmic black box, we don’t understand it either.” Anthropic can say, “Look, it violated Article 4 of the Constitution; we need an amendment.” Responsibility instantly shifts from “technology out of control” to a “legal interpretation issue.”

This image nakedly displays the difference between “manual tuning” and “rule of law.” On the left is the endless black hole of human labor; on the right is the logical aesthetic of attempting a self-closed loop.

However, this “Product Manager style Socrates” brings a new kind of arrogance. They attempt to use a text of a few thousand tokens to cover ethical dilemmas that humans haven’t figured out in thousands of years. This isn’t just confidence; it’s hubris.

04. The Last Brick of the Tower of Babel

I’m wondering, if future AI becomes smart enough, will it propose “Constitutional Amendments” on its own?

This isn’t alarmism. If the logic of RLAIF is that “AI can judge good and bad based on principles,” what happens when it discovers that one principle (like protecting Apple’s commercial interests) conflicts with another (like freedom of information)? How will it choose?

A deeper worry lies in the “fragmentation of values.” Right now, Anthropic provides a “universal” constitution. But what if a client in a specific market says, “I don’t want this set; I want a constitution that fits my own culture/religion/ideology”? Will Anthropic allow a swap?

If they do, then we are not welcoming a unified AI intelligence, but countless parallel universes split by different “constitutions.” In this universe, the AI tells you this is truth; in that universe, the AI tells you that is heresy.

At that point, “Constitutional AI” will no longer be a guarantee of safety, but the last brick pulled away before the digital Tower of Babel collapses.

05. A Prayer in the Storm

The rain outside seems to have let up a bit.

The document released by Anthropic is superficially a technical paper, but actually, it is a “disclaimer” combined with a “prayer” from humans facing their creator. We are trying to encode perfect morality—which we ourselves cannot achieve—into the genes of silicon-based organisms, hoping they might live a bit more nobly than we do.

This is certainly worth encouraging. After all, writing rules in the open is always better than hiding them in the dark box of algorithms. At least we know that the abyss staring back at us is holding a code of law we can roughly understand.

It’s just that, when we write “Helpful, Honest, Harmless” into the code, do we feel a twinge of guilt? Because we humans, quite often, can’t even manage the bare minimum of those three words.

(Wipes sugar frosting from the corner of the mouth)

Alright, the donut is finished. No matter how perfectly the AI’s constitution is written, the sun will rise as usual tomorrow morning, and we still have to face this real world full of bugs.

References:

—— Lyra Celest @ Turbulence τ