Constitutional AI is a training method developed by Anthropic for making a model harmless without relying solely on humans to label harmful content. The model is given a written set of principles (a “constitution”) and learns to critique and revise its own responses against those principles, then trains on its improved answers using AI-generated feedback.
The method was introduced in Anthropic’s 2022 paper “Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback” (Bai et al.). The abstract frames the motivation directly: as systems get more capable, “we would like to enlist their help to supervise other AIs.” This reduces the amount of human labeling of disturbing content and makes the model’s values explicit and inspectable rather than buried in opaque human judgments.
Constitutional AI is part of the lineage behind Anthropic’s Claude models.
Why business readers should care: Constitutional AI offers a more transparent, auditable way to set an AI’s guardrails — the rules are written down. For organizations that must justify why an AI behaves as it does, that explicitness has real governance value.