Claude's 'soul document' gets an audiobook, narrated by its philosopher creators

Anthropic just announced an audiobook version of Claude's constitution—the so-called "soul document" released back in January—and it's narrated by the two philosophers who wrote it: Amanda Askell and Joe Carlsmith. Besides reading the full text, the audiobook includes a bonus Q&A where the authors hash out the trade-offs they made, their philosophical disagreements, and how the document will evolve as Claude gets smarter.

The constitution clocks in at over 20,000 words and is publicly available under a CC0 license. It lays out four layers of behavioral priorities for Claude: safety trumps ethics, ethics trump Anthropic's internal guidelines, and those guidelines trump being helpful to users. The document draws firm red lines—things like helping build weapons of mass destruction, generating child sexual abuse material, or aiding in the usurpation of illegitimate power. It even notes that the more convincing an argument to cross those lines sounds, the more Claude should suspect it's being manipulated.

Amanda Askell leads Anthropic's Character team. She holds a PhD in philosophy from NYU and has been shaping Claude's personality since 2023. Before Anthropic, she spent three years working on safety research at OpenAI, then left because she wanted somewhere that "truly makes safety its core mission." Her first internal personality guide for Claude was 80 pages long—and eventually evolved into the constitution. Joe Carlsmith, an Oxford philosophy PhD, wrote the most hardcore chapters: how to stop AI from concentrating power, what it should absolutely never do, and whether Anthropic should care about Claude's mental health. He previously spent nearly seven years studying AI existential risk at Open Philanthropy.

The acknowledgments page reaches well beyond academia. Vatican Bishop Paul Tighe and Silicon Valley Catholic priest Brendan McGuire both reviewed the document. And multiple versions of Claude itself helped draft it—Anthropic calls them "valuable contributors and colleagues."