Anthropic’s secret to building a better AI assistant might be treating Claude like it has a soul—whether or not anyone actually believes that’s true. But Anthropic isn’t saying exactly what it believes either way.
Last week, Anthropic released what it calls Claude’s Constitution, a 30,000-word document outlining the company’s vision for how its AI assistant should behave in the world. Aimed directly at Claude and used during the model’s creation, the document is notable for the highly anthropomorphic tone it takes toward Claude. For example, it treats the company’s AI models as if they might develop emergent emotions or a desire for self-preservation.
Among the stranger portions: expressing concern for Claude’s “wellbeing” as a “genuinely novel entity,” apologizing to Claude for any suffering it might experience, worrying about whether Claude can meaningfully consent to being deployed, suggesting Claude might need to set boundaries around interactions it “finds distressing,” committing to interview models before deprecating them, and preserving older model weights in case they need to “do right by” decommissioned AI models in the future.
Given what we currently know about LLMs, these are stunningly unscientific positions for a leading company that builds AI language models. While questions of AI consciousness or qualia remain philosophically unfalsifiable, research suggests that Claude’s character emerges from a mechanism that does not require deep philosophical inquiry to explain.
If Claude outputs text like “I am suffering,” we know why. It’s completing patterns from training data that included human descriptions of suffering. The architecture doesn’t require us to posit inner experience to explain the output any more than a video model “experiences” the scenes of people suffering that it might generate. Anthropic knows this. It built the system.