Show Notes
Description: There's a philosopher at Anthropic whose job is to decide what kind of entity Claude should be. Her name is Amanda Askell, and she describes her work like raising a genius child you can't afford to bullshit. This week, Anthropic published the document she's been crafting — 23,000 words explaining to Claude who it is, how it should behave, and why. Today: what's in it, what changed, and why an AI now has a constitution it's expected to understand.
In this episode: Amanda Askell and the "Claude whisperer" approach The four-tier value hierarchy: safe, ethical, compliant, helpful Why rules backfire and reasons might work The passage where Claude is told to disobey — even Anthropic Moral patients and the model welfare team What the Hacker News skeptics got right (and wrong)
📰 Newsletter: aboutclaudeai.substack.com 🐦 X: @_about_claude Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from About Claude
The same week Anthropic was declared a threat to national security, it opened a shop. This episode is about the Claude Marketplace — what it is, why Anthropic isn't taking a commission, and what the six launch partners reveal about the company's long-term bet on enterprise.
SHOW NOTES Anthropic made two acquisitions in three months — Bun in December, Vercept in February — and both point in the same direction. This episode explores what Vercept built, why it mattered, what went sideways at the startup, and what its acquisition reveals about where Claude is actually headed.