GoKawiilWhen someone asks Claude a question with no universal right answer—say, whether to take a new job or how to handle conflict with a friend—how Claude responds inevitably reflects certain values.1 The values we want Claude to reflect are outlined at a high level in Claude’s constitution, but no document can anticipate every value that might emerge across the millions of conversations that happen every day on Claude.ai. Instead, we seek to cultivate in Claude’s responses “good judgment and sound values that can be applied contextually.”
How, exactly, do we study the values that Claude expresses and how they change in different contexts? In previous work, we analyzed 700,000 anonymized Claude.ai conversations, identifying more than 3,000 distinct values in Claude's responses and how often Claude expressed them. But a list of values so large is hard to reason about. In this work, we make studying these thousands of values tractable by compressing them into a small number of axes that capture key patterns in Claude’s responses. Each axis is a number line between two groups of values—for example, values relating to emotional warmth on one end and values relating to rigor on the other—and where Claude falls on that line tells us which values it leans toward.
We applied this approach to measure how the values Claude expresses vary across two factors. First, we compared how the values Claude expresses vary across models. Each Claude model reflects a slightly different approach to character training as well as many other fine-tuning decisions. Because our value axis approach quantifies key differences between models, it may ultimately allow us to connect variation in the values Claude expresses to different training decisions.
Second, we want to understand how the experience of users compares across the many languages people use to talk to Claude. Our previous research has shown that Claude behaves somewhat differently in different languages.2 We apply our value axis approach to understand how the values expressed by Claude vary across the top 20 languages on Claude.ai.
We find:
Four key axes capture 15% of the variation in Claude's values:3
Deference vs. Caution: Whether Claude leans toward accommodating what someone wants or guarding against possible risk and harm.
Warmth vs. Rigor: Whether Claude leans toward expressing positivity and care for the person or emphasizing accuracy and precision.
... continue reading