Scaling Laws: Claude's Constitution, with Amanda Askell
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 20 February 2026
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Alan Rozenshtein, research director at Lawfare, and Kevin Frazier, senior editor at Lawfare, speak with Amanda Askell, head of personality alignment at Anthropic, about Claude's Constitution, a 20,000-word document that describes the values, character, and ethical framework of Anthropic's flagship AI model and plays a direct role in its training.
The conversation covers how the constitution is used during supervised learning and reinforcement learning to shape Claude's behavior; analogies to constitutional law, including fidelity to text, the potential for a body of "case law," and the principal hierarchy of Anthropic, operators, and users; the decision to ground the constitution in virtue ethics and practical judgment rather than rigid rules; the document's treatment of Claude's potential moral patienthood and the question of AI personhood; whether the constitution's values are too Western and culturally specific; the tension between Anthropic's commercial incentives and its stated mission; and whether the constitutional approach can generalize to specialized domains like cybersecurity and military applications.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Electronic Communications Privacy Act turns 40 this year, and it's showing its age. |
| 0:06.0 | On Friday, March 6th, Lawfare and Georgetown Law are bringing together leading scholars, |
| 0:11.1 | practitioners, and former government officials for installing updates to ECPA, a half-day event |
| 0:16.6 | on what's broken with the statute and how to fix it. The event is free and open to the public, in person and online. |
| 0:23.2 | Visit lawfaremedia.org slash ECPA event. |
| 0:26.4 | That's lawfaremedia.org slash ECPA event for details and to register. |
| 0:35.3 | It's the Lawfare podcast. |
| 0:37.4 | I'm Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a senior editor at Lawfare. Today we're bringing you something a little different. It's an episode from our new podcast series, Scaling Laws. Scaling Laws is a creation of lawfare and Texas law. It has a pretty simple |
| 0:56.8 | aim, but a huge mission. We cover the most important AI and law policy questions that are top |
| 1:03.2 | of mind for everyone from Sam Altman to Senators on the Hill to folks like you. We dive deep |
| 1:09.4 | into the weeds of new laws, various proposals, and what the labs are up to |
| 1:14.0 | to make sure you're up to date on the rules and regulations, standards, and ideas that are |
| 1:19.4 | shaping the future of this pivotal technology. |
| 1:22.2 | If that sounds like something you're going to be interested in and are hunches it is, |
| 1:26.2 | you can find scaling laws wherever |
| 1:28.2 | you subscribe to podcasts. You can also follow us on X and Blue Sky. Thank you. |
| 1:37.5 | When the AI overlords take over, what are you most excited about? It's not crazy. It's just smart. |
| 1:43.8 | And just this year, in the first six months, there have been something like a thousand laws. |
| 1:48.3 | Who's actually building the scaffolding around how it's going to work, how everyday folks are going to use it? |
| 1:53.5 | AI only works if society lets it work. |
| 1:56.3 | There are so many questions have to be figured out. |
| 1:59.5 | And nobody came to my bonus class let's enforce the |
... |
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