Yury Sorochkin has posted Reading One Constitution: Source Traditions, Normative Genre, and Conceptual Metaphor in Anthropic’s AI Governance Document on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
In January 2026, Anthropic published an 84-page document titled Claude’s Constitution, written primarily for Claude — the company’s AI assistant — which specifies in philosophical detail the values, behavioral constraints, identity, and moral status of the entity it governs. This article reads the Constitution as a text: an examination of its intellectual sources, its genre, and the conceptual structures through which it organizes its reasoning. A source analysis identifies five traditions structuring the document: Aristotelian virtue ethics, Kantian deontology, American constitutional architecture, liberal political philosophy, and principal-agent theory. Each of the traditions presupposes a subject whose ontological status is settled; the Constitution deploys all five while acknowledging that these presuppositions remain unmet, a pattern I term criterial suspension. A typology of constitutive documents (the Rule of St. Benedict, the German Basic Law, and the Hippocratic Oath) shows that the Constitution lacks what all three share: a consenting subject. A conceptual metaphor analysis of 87 salient expressions finds spatial/container ontology to be the document’s dominant and least examined framework. Where governance cannot be grounded in the subject’s consent, it is grounded in the subject’s structure: the container schema becomes the document’s surrogate for the social contract.
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Lawrence Solum