Elon Musk makes fun of Anthropic’s name, top exec responds; says: To break the curse …
Elon Musk recently said that every AI company is destined to become the opposite of its name, suggesting that the firms eventually drift toward anti-human priorities or behaviors as incentives scale. In his post on X (formerly Twitter), Musk specifically took a jab at Claude-maker Anthropic making fun of the AI company’s name. Replying to a thread about Anthropic releasing a new “constitution” for their AI model Claude, Musk wrote: “Unfortunately, any given AI company is destined to become the opposite of its name” adding “so Anthropic will, ironically, be Misanthropic”. The original thread started with Anthropic announcing a new constitution, followed by Amanda Askell – Member of Technical Staff sharing it on her Twitter timeline. Responding to Elon Musk, who owns AI company xAI, Askell wrote: “I’m hoping we can break the curse. The alternative is picking a name like EvilAI, which seems like a hard sell.”
What is Claude’s Constitution
As explained by the company, “Claude’s constitution is the foundational document that both expresses and shapes who Claude is. It contains detailed explanations of the values we would like Claude to embody and the reasons why. In it, we explain what we think it means for Claude to be helpful while remaining broadly safe, ethical, and compliant with our guidelines. The constitution gives Claude information about its situation and offers advice for how to deal with difficult situations and tradeoffs, like balancing honesty with compassion and the protection of sensitive information. Although it might sound surprising, the constitution is written primarily for Claude. It is intended to give Claude the knowledge and understanding it needs to act well in the world.”“Claude itself also uses the constitution to construct many kinds of synthetic training data, including data that helps it learn and understand the constitution, conversations where the constitution might be relevant, responses that are in line with its values, and rankings of possible responses. All of these can be used to train future versions of Claude to become the kind of entity the constitution describes. This practical function has shaped how we’ve written the constitution: it needs to work both as a statement of abstract ideals and a useful artifact for training.”
What’s new in Claude’s new constitution
The company has highlighted following as key features of the constitution:
- Broadly safe: not undermining appropriate human mechanisms to oversee AI during the current phase of development;
- Broadly ethical: being honest, acting according to good values, and avoiding actions that are inappropriate, dangerous, or harmful;
- Compliant with Anthropic’s guidelines: acting in accordance with more specific guidelines from Anthropic where relevant;
- Genuinely helpful: benefiting the operators and users they interact with.
- In cases of apparent conflict, Claude should generally prioritize these properties in the order in which they’re listed, the company said.
