On writing AI constitutions - Joe Carlsmith

From a talk at Yale Law School in March 2026.

(This is the video and transcript of a talk I gave at Yale Law School in March 2026. The slides are also available here. Transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity. I work at Anthropic but I am speaking only for myself and not for my employer.) Thank you for having me. It’s nice to be here. So yeah, I’m Joe. I work at Anthropic. I helped write the constitution for Claude, the company’s AI. Just a quick show of hands — how many people have some familiarity with the constitution? Okay, great. Great. I’m going to be talking today about writing documents like that. I’m here…

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