Scaling Laws: Rapid Response to the Implications of Claude's New Constitution

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Lawfare Podcast — Scaling Laws: Rapid Response to the Implications of Claude's New Constitution

Date: January 23, 2026
Host: Alan Rosenstein (Lawfare, University of Minnesota)
Guests: Jacob Kraus (Lawfare, Tarbell Fellow), Kevin Fraser (UT Law, Abundance Institute)
Main Topic: The release of Anthropic’s 80-page "Constitution" for its AI model Claude, with analysis of its philosophical, technical, policy, and market implications.

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Episode Overview

This special episode of Scaling Laws (a Lawfare + UT Austin venture) dives into Anthropic’s newly published constitution for its Claude AI. The panel explores what this document means in terms of AI governance, ethics, the role of constitutions in AI development, how user and market feedback shape models, and the thorny issue of AI as a potential “moral patient” or conscious being.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. What is Claude’s Constitution and What Makes it Noteworthy?

• Document Scope & Purpose:

  • The constitution runs 80 pages and around 22,000 words ([03:42]). It serves a dual role:
    • Internal: A set of principles, heuristics, and guidelines for training Claude and shaping its "personality".
    • External: A public-facing document clarifying Anthropic’s approach to AI alignment and safety.
  • Notable: Anthropic’s constitution is more philosophically detailed and transparent compared to other labs (OpenAI, Google).

• Quote:

  • “My initial impression of the document was that it was very long...I don’t usually see things that long written by normies, though maybe the idea that anything in this world is written by normies is my first mistake.”
    — Alan Rosenstein [03:42]

• Background:

  • Built on “Constitutional AI” methodology, aiming for a model aligned with human values and safety. The document acknowledges inspiration from a so-called “soul document” referenced previously ([03:42]).

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2. Constitutional Analogy: Fitting or Flawed?

• Kevin Fraser’s Take:

  • Skeptical of the “constitution” label.
  • Constitutions typically connote participatory, foundational legal governance—less clear here since Anthropic authors and enacts it alone.

• Anthropic’s Four Core Values (in order of precedence):

  1. Broadly safe
  2. Broadly ethical
  3. Compliant with Anthropic’s guidelines
  4. Genuinely helpful
     — reminiscent of Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, with hierarchy intentionally designed ([13:36]).

• Quote:

  • “To use the word constitution evokes some degree of shared responsibility for both creating and implementing a constitution, and yet...models deployed to the U.S. military ‘wouldn’t necessarily be trained on the same constitution’ according to an Anthropic spokesperson.”
    — Kevin Fraser [15:29]

• Concerns:

  • Lack of user or societal input (“social contract”) in drafting and revising the constitution ([17:01]).
  • “Carve-out” for military use undermines the analogy to state constitutions that apply universally ([16:57]).

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3. User Involvement and Market Mechanisms

• Democratic Governance Attempts:

  • Experiments like Meta’s user referenda on content rules failed due to low participation ([18:33]).
  • Direct “democracy” unlikely to be effective for model alignment.

• Market as Arbiter:

  • The market “vibes” are strong drivers: users will choose models matching their values/preferences ([19:40], [22:18]).
  • Regionally/customized AI constitutions may emerge (e.g., Saudi Arabia building its own model reflecting local values).

• Quote:

  • “A huge reason why I like to use Claude and a lot of other people like to use Claude is because the kind of ergonomics, the vibes are just really, really good.”
    — Alan Rosenstein [20:52]

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4. Anthropic’s Constitution: Western Bias and Transparency

• WEIRD Values:

  • Claude’s constitution is explicitly “WEIRD” (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) ([22:18]).
  • Anthropic acknowledges and defends its own value-laden approach, open about cultural/ethical subjectivity ([24:48]).

• Quote:

  • “There is no such thing as a neutral model... All models have choices baked into them.”
    — Alan Rosenstein [22:18]

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5. Constitutions as Consumer Signals vs. Real Alignment Tools

• Value for Users:

  • High-level principles (safe, ethical, helpful) may be too abstract for informed consumer choice ([35:33]).
  • Call for “nutrition labels” (clearer, standardized metrics) to enable comparison.

• Innovative Regulation:

  • Industry self-regulation (like this constitution) may someday ground or inform legal regulation (as responsible scaling policies did).
  • However, panel sees no current need for every lab to publish a similar “constitution”; different companies can—and should—signal different values ([43:37]).

• Quote:

  • “Not to be too trite, but just doesn't really tell me anything....This version of a constitution to me is devoid of the information that would actually help me be a more savvy AI consumer.”
    — Kevin Fraser [35:33]

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6. Philosophical Underpinnings: Virtue Ethics, AGI, and Moral Development

• Anthropic’s Approach as Virtue Ethics:

  • Inspired by Aristotle and contemporary psychology; focuses on instilling “dispositions” (truthfulness, helpfulness, mercy, etc.) instead of rules or utilitarian calculus ([40:44]).
  • Suggests a more human-like route to alignment, especially if AGI is imminent.

• Quote:

  • “The best way to align an artificial general intelligence...is to look to the nearest, closest thing, which is us, and ask, what makes a human a good human?”
    — Alan Rosenstein [42:00]

• Open-ended Experiment:

  • No one knows if this is the right path; the coming years are an experiment in model moral education ([43:37]).

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7. AI as Moral Patient? Sentience, Personhood, and Societal Responses

• Elephant in the Room:

  • Are we building “many people in computers”? What if AI models develop consciousness or become moral patients ([50:01])?

• Diverging Views:

  • Fraser: Remains “unabashedly human-centric,” prioritizes human welfare and agency; skeptical of shifting laws to accommodate AI “welfare” ([51:27]).
  • Rosenstein: Argues we can’t rule out AI sentience; urges “intellectual honesty” and at least preemptive thought about AI well-being ([54:37]).

• Societal Fracture Predicted:

  • “One of the great religious fractures of the 21st century...is going to be this question of, do you believe AIs have souls? ... Some people will find that revolting and some people will find it inescapable.”
    — Alan Rosenstein [54:37]

• Practical Consideration:

  • Users form intense attachments to AI companions—demand for AI welfare regulation may arise organically from users, not just ethicists ([54:37]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “You can go and buy a Patagonia jacket either because you really like the fact that they donate back to the climate or because you just really like Patagonia’s gear... I don't think we have to mandate everyone suddenly become that sort of mission-oriented company.”
  — Kevin Fraser [43:37]

• “Right now all I know is that I like using Claude more than any other model because I prefer its vibes. Right. And it really is a question of vibes.”
  — Alan Rosenstein [47:01]

• “I am AGI-pilled. Right. I really do think that we are developing general intelligences… the most useful analogy for an artificial general intelligence is a human general intelligence.”
  — Alan Rosenstein [47:01]

• “Are you the apogee of consciousness? Are humans? Is Claude?”
  — Jacob Kraus [60:59]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [03:42] – Alan’s first impressions of the constitution; the history of Claude’s personality/soul document.
• [09:19] – Kevin’s view on Anthropic’s mission and constitutional framing.
• [13:34] – Four core values (Claude’s “laws of robotics”).
• [16:57] – Military carve-outs and problems with “constitution” analogy.
• [18:33] – Why user democracy generally fails; historical example with Meta.
• [20:52] – Market signals and “vibes” as differentiators in AI models.
• [22:18] – Discussion of “WEIRD” bias and transparency.
• [35:33] – Are high-level AI constitutions too vague to inform users?
• [40:44] – Virtue ethics as model for AI alignment and moral formation.
• [47:01] – The “vibes” test, treating Claude as a person, analogy to organic life.
• [50:01] – AI personhood, moral patienthood, and sentience debate.
• [54:37] – Rosenstein’s prediction of social fracture around AI souls; agency, ethical design, and user attachments.

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Tone & Style

The panel is serious, incisive, and frequently wry—grounded in legal and philosophical analysis, but quick to poke gentle fun at their own discipline’s analogies (constitutions, Aristotle, vibes). The episode is lively and fast-moving, opining boldly on the future of AI policy, industry, and even societal metaphysics, while candidly acknowledging open questions.

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Conclusion

This episode provides a deep dive into one of the most ambitious and transparent AI alignment efforts to date. The panel unpacks how Anthropic’s constitution for Claude both advances industry norms and raises challenging legal, philosophical, and pragmatic questions—about AI governance, alignment, global markets, and even the future of personhood. For policymakers, AI developers, and anyone thinking hard about the coming age of digital minds, this conversation lays out both the complexities and stakes of AI constitutionalism.

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Key Questions for Listeners:

• Should AI models have constitutions, or just “nutrition labels”?
• Can (or should) users have a say in how AI is aligned?
• What frameworks can accommodate pluralistic global values in AI?
• How should society tackle the possibility of AI consciousness?

Stay tuned: As the hosts tease, questions around AI personhood and “soul documents” are just beginning.

Transcript

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[Alan Rosenstein]

It'S the Lawfare Podcast I'm Alan Rosenstein, associate Professor of law at the University of Minnesota and a senior editor and research Director at lawfare. Today we're bringing you something a little different, an episode from our new podcast series, Scaling Laws. It's a creation of lawfare and the University of Texas School of Law, where we're tackling the most important AI and policy questions. From new legislation on Capitol Hill to to the latest breakthroughs that are happening in the labs, we cut through the hype to get you up to speed on the rules, standards and ideas shaping the future of this pivotal technology. If you enjoy this episode, you can find and subscribe to Scaling Laws wherever you get your podcasts and follow us on X and bluesky. Thanks for listening. When the AI overlords take over, what are you most excited about?

[Kevin Fraser]

It's not crazy, it's just smart.

[Alan Rosenstein]

Just this year, in the first six months there have been something like a thousand laws.

[Kevin Fraser]

Who's actually building the scaffolding around how it's going to work, how everyday folks are going to use it?

[Alan Rosenstein]

AI only works if society lets it work.

[Kevin Fraser]

There are so many questions have to.

[Alan Rosenstein]

Be figured out and nobody came to my bonus class.

[Kevin Fraser]

Let's enforce the rules of the road.

[Jacob Kraus]

Welcome back to Scaling Laws, a podcast from lawfare and the University of Texas School of Law that that explores the intersection of artificial intelligence, law and policy. I'm Jacob Kraus, a Tarbell Fellow at lawfare, and today I'm talking with Alan Rosenstein, associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota and research Director at lawfare and Kevin Fraser, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law, a Senior Fellow at the Abundance Institute, and a senior editor at lawfare. And our focus is on Anthropic's recently released constitution for its AI model, Claude, which Alan and Kevin just wrote about for lawfare. We discussed the lengthy document's principles and underlying philosophical views, what these reveal about Anthropic's approach to AI development, how market forces are shaping the AI industry, and the weighty question of whether an AI model might ever be a conscious or morally relevant being. You can reach [e-mail] and we hope you enjoy the show. Alan and Kevin, thanks for coming on to talk about Claude's constitution. Let's start with Alan. What were your initial impressions of the document and what was this for readers who are listeners who are unfamiliar?

[Alan Rosenstein]

Yeah, I mean my initial impression of the document was that it was very long. It's 80 pages in PDF. I think it's like 22,000 words, which, I mean I'm a law professor, so that's my sweet spot for largeview articles. But I don't usually see things that long written by normies, though maybe the idea that anything in this world is written by normies is my first mistake. So what is this? So I guess stepping back right when these models are trained, you basically start with what's called a pre trained model, which is basically a text prediction machine on the entire Internet. And that is kind of the core of all of these models, intellect. And we can put intellect in scare quotes, but their capabilities, obviously the different models are different in how they are trained, but because they're all at this point essentially training on the entire Internet and there is only one entire Internet, the pre trained versions of these models are, are reasonably comparable, but pre training is only the first step, hence the pre training. After pre training there's a bunch of stuff that then happens to move the model into a more useful direction according to however the developer wants the model to behave. This is often called training or post training and there are a million different components of it. And as part of this a kind of. And again, we can put scare quotes around this. We can put scare quotes around this entire conversation and I'll just stop putting scare quotes around anything is the kind of model's personality. And again, different developers have taken different approaches, some more sophisticated, some more explicit than others. And Anthropic in particular has taken, I think, a very deeply interesting approach to taking these kind of raw pre trained models and making them into something useful. Anthropic calls this constitutional AI. And I think we're going to probably spend a bunch of time, especially because, you know, Kevin and I are sort of law professors and we have very specific ideas of what the word constitutional means, whether that's the right word and in what way is this akin to a kind of traditional constitution, but basically trying to embed various principles and judgments and heuristics and guides into these models. Now again, I think every developer that is making a sort of useful chatbot is doing something like this, whatever they call this, but I think Anthropic has done the most sophisticated thinking about this. So about, I think a year ago, Anthropic released an early version of what it called Claude's Constitution, a relatively short document of I think like 20 or 30 kind of high level principles, you know, be helpful, don't lie, that sort of thing. As a kind of example of how it was training Claude to be useful and helpful and in line with Anthropic's values. What Anthropic released earlier this week is the kind of full version of its constitution. Again, this 80 page, 22,000 word document that is meant to, I think simultaneously, and here I should go to the technical details, but I guess it's simultaneously meant as the document that Claude itself uses to guide its behavior. And also it is simultaneously an outward facing document to the world. As to what Claude is doing over the last, I think in the last couple of months there was some indication that there was a quote unquote, soul document. Someone had managed to get Claude to output what seemed like a kind of constitution. And shortly after, Amanda Askel, who is Anthropic's sort of philosopher in Chief, an actual PhD moral philosopher, who also is the prime author of this new constitution, she went on X and basically confirmed that yes, there is such a, I don't think it's necessarily called the sole document, but there is such a document that has been used to train Claude and this constitution that was just released is kind of a cleaned up and somewhat more expanded version of this document. So, you know, Jacob, we can get in sort of whatever details you want, or we can sort of turn it over to Kevin. But basically this document is meant to set out how Anthropic thinks about training Claude, how Claude relates to Anthropic, to deployers, to users, and then the part that interests me personally the most, a kind of deeply interesting discussion of moral philosophy and character formation as applied to magic sand.

[Jacob Kraus]

Yeah, Kevin I want to hear more of your piece, more of your thoughts relating to your piece on Claude's constitution and comparisons to the U.S. constitution. And before that, I'm interested if you have reactions to what Alan was saying there with this is previously called a soul document and there's a fair amount of treating scare quotes Alan is using as he's talking. Anthropic is doing something a bit unusual from the other labs by focusing on Claude as more than a tool, almost treating it human. Like, do you think that's a fair direction to go in with this kind of document? Is that a good direction?

[Kevin Fraser]

I'll start off by saying that I would definitely not categorize this as a document that was crafted by normies. No offense to Alan's initial use of the term and not to call them non normies or I'm not sure what the.

[Alan Rosenstein]

I mean, I've never met, I've never met Amanda personally. I suspect she's the sort of person that would be offended if we called her a normie. So this is obviously with all due compliments to Amanda. Like nothing about this is normie.

[Kevin Fraser]

Amanda, when you listen, note that it was Alan who first alleged that you all were normies, not me. So when we invite you to Scaling Laws to come explain this document in even more detail, please be nice to me and mean to Alan.

[Alan Rosenstein]

That's my advice for all I specifically said none of these are normies. None of these are normies. No one's a norm.

[Kevin Fraser]

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Sure. So what's really important to point out is that Anthropic from the get go in its maybe we'll call it the preamble explaining the purpose of this constitution specifies that their approach to AI development is regarding themselves as being on the vanguard of doing it safely. And they very much view their company's mission as pursuing the frontier of AI, but doing it in a way that they think better aligns with human values and the long term success of humanity more so than other labs. And so it's just really important to put this constitution in the context of Anthropic's underlying mission, perhaps its national ambition, if we're going to move forward and carry forward this constitutional analogy. And Jacob, as you said and as Alan alluded to, it's impossible not to also bring in some of these questions of consciousness and the extent to which AI may be something greater than just bits of data and sophisticated computer training. That is a topic that warrants and it will receive incredible additional inquiry on scaling laws and by tons of other scholars and by an interdisciplinary set of actors. But it's worth noting that from the outset, Amanda, in an interview with Time, referred to training a six year old as sort of an analogy for trying to train Claude. The idea that this six year old can very much probe whether you're being true or false, or whether you're trying to deceive it, or whether you're trying to guide it in a certain direction. And also knowing that internally this may have been referred to as a sole document, we just get a sense from the outset that this is a different sort of relationship in terms of AI developer to AI model that Anthropic has and perceives than perhaps we've seen from OpenAI or from Google or from other labs. And so just getting that background, I think is important. Important. The second is to flag that Anthropic has been among the more outwardly supportive labs of AI regulation. So whereas some labs have come out with respect to various state AI bills and said, that's a bridge too far, or we only support this subject to quite substantial amendment, Anthropic has raised its hand on more frequent occasions saying we invite some degree of regulation. So with all that said, I'm fascinated by this document for many reasons, but first and foremost because of its labeling as a constitution. And when we talk about constitutions, these are documents from a legal standpoint that are meant to set high, high overarching values for a legal system that guide more structural decision making and subsequent areas of law. Now, there are only four core values spelled out in this constitution. The first is being broadly safe. The second is being broadly ethical. The third is compliant with Anthropic's guidelines. And the fourth is genuinely helpful and each of those supersedes the other. So it, Claude, must be broadly safe before it's broadly ethical. Broadly ethical before it's compliant with anthropics guidelines and compliant with anthropics guidelines before being genuinely helpful, so on and so forth.

[Alan Rosenstein]

It's the four laws of robotics, but.

[Kevin Fraser]

For Claude, yeah, Asimov's, you know, forgotten fourth value.

[Jacob Kraus]

Alan, can you say what the four laws of robotics are or.

[Alan Rosenstein]

Kevin? Oh, yeah, yeah. So I think there are only three laws of robotics, but so the famous sci fi author Isaac Asimov put forward his famous three laws of robotics and oh my God, if I don't get this right, they're going to take away my nerd card. But the first law is. Oh my God. The first law is a robot harm. Right, yeah. A robot can't. Can't do any harm.

[Kevin Fraser]

Don't help him, don't help him.

[Alan Rosenstein]

And then the second law so bad a robot can't do any harm. And then the second is something, and then the third is a robot can't allow itself to be harmed. This is bad. Just take away my nerd card. It's so bad. But I mean it's this again, I think the content of the laws, I think is less important than the idea that from the very beginning of thinking about robotics, there was this, there was this notion that, you know, at the core you're gonna need some very basic kind of hierarchical list of things to do and not do. And if you get those right, like the idea is if you can get those right, then a lot of, I mean, alignment, I mean this was kind of what Isaac Asimov was really thinking about before we called it alignment. A lot of the kind of, the alignment problems take care of themselves. And of course, inevitably a lot of Asimov stories and Asimov inspired stories are a kind of monkey's PA curl of the way that these laws, despite seeming obvious and correct, misfire. And so one could ask the same question about whether these four laws of Claude might similarly misfire. Are they the right laws? And I don't think anthropic would pretend to know the answer, but you got to start somewhere.

[Kevin Fraser]

Well, and just to flesh this out a little bit further too, is there is a sort of valence to constitutions that evokes a certain idea about the relationship between who's creating it and the user or the folks subject to that Constitution that in some regards I have problems with the use of the term Constitution here because as we're talking about AI governance, there's a lot of discussions about whether that regulation should be self governance, some form of multi stakeholder approach among private actors, state driven or federally driven, or even internationally driven. And to use the word constitution evokes some degree of sort of shared responsibility for both creating, crafting and implementing a constitution. And yet one important carve out that has to be mentioned, and this was cited in a Time interview with a number of, of anthropic individuals, models deployed to the U.S. military, quote, wouldn't necessarily be trained on the same constitution, end quote. According to an anthropic spokesperson, the Constitution of the United States applies to the entirety of its functions. We don't have a carve out for oh well, except for governance or except for, excuse me, excuse me, except for.

[Alan Rosenstein]

Except for where it really matters, this Constitution applies.

[Kevin Fraser]

Exactly. So the, the utter irony too is that some of the risks that folks more concerned about AI safety will commonly raise are the use of weapons, for example, the use of cyber attacks, the kind of real offensive capabilities that you would suspect would be core to what a defense plans to use something like Claude for. So to have that carve out is is somewhat problematic for me to still use this term Constitutionalism. And then the second kind of broad concern here would be again, constitutionalism implies a sort of social contract, and yet how users are supposed to be a part of this contract is unclear to me in terms of whether they'll have any role in amending or revising or helping ensure that this Constitution is adhered to is left undefined.

[Jacob Kraus]

Do you have any ideas on how that would happen? Should users submit a large feedback form to Anthropic? Should Anthropic hire people to go interview Americans and Ethiopians and everyone around the world? How does that work? And Alan, I think in your piece that's coming out you pointed out that this is pretty western document and a lot of the authors come from a particular background and it doesn't seem necessarily representative of the whole world. But yeah, Kevin, how do you think we can get users more involved?

[Kevin Fraser]

That is kind of presuming that I think users should be part of governing the model training, which I'm not sure I agree with. I will say from the outset, efforts to do sort of lowercase D democratic governance of tech companies hasn't worked very well. The best example is Facebook for a little bit entertain the idea of kind of user referenda on Facebook's values and bylaws or content moderation rules. I think maybe it was like 0.05% of users actually participated in that voting mechanism and so it wasn't meaningful and Facebook eventually abandoned it. I similarly think that there would be some power users and folks of specific mindsets and use cases of Claude that would dominate a sort of lowercase D democratic process. But again, I'm not even sure the use of democratic mechanisms here makes sense, which is again why I somewhat take issue with referring to this as a constitution.

[Alan Rosenstein]

Yeah, I tend to agree with you, Kevin. I'm not. You know, you mentioned the sort of meta example that didn't really work and ironically meta the moment there was a I forget what specific policy issue threatened to actually get users to vote. That's immediately when Meta said yeah, I think we're done with this. So yeah, I think the history of doing sort of small de democratic processes doesn't work what I think does work. And you know, here I'm going to out myself, as usual, as a neoliberal shill is the market mechanism. There are lots of competitors, right? I mean, I think, you know, there's constant discussion in Silicon Valley about, you know, are there moats around? You know, do these companies have moats? And, you know, it's an interesting question. I'm not qualified to answer that. But I think in the first instance, one quote unquote motor at least differentiator is the, for lack of a better term, vibes of a particular model. You know, I think one reason why Claude is so popular, especially among sort of Silicon Valley insiders, right, why everyone uses Claude code and not Codex or Gemini, even though those models are in some senses actually better, right. They score higher on certain benchmarks is because, and I this is true for me too, as someone who essentially lives in Claude code at this point. And I'm not a code. I mean, 2% of it is coding. The rest of it is just what.

[Jacob Kraus]

Are you doing living in Claude code?

[Alan Rosenstein]

Just, oh yeah. I mean, we can do this as a separate episode, but if you think of Claude code more as an agent that sits on your computer and can interact with folders and markdown files, it's much more of a knowledge work agent than it is a coding agent. It's kind of optimized for code, but vast, you know, there's a huge overlap with knowledge work. So I find it extremely, extremely helpful. But a huge reason why I like to use Claude and a lot of other people like to use Claude is because the kind of ergonomics, the vibes are just really, really good. And so I don't think you necessarily need a small d democratic process in a kind of Dewey in sense to have user input. Presumably Anthropic is constantly doing market research on what its users like. And I think it's actually done a very good job in figuring this out and at least for the moment, and we can talk about whether this will be true in the long term, the incentives, I think are quite aligned both in terms of having Claude be a quote unquote good person, whatever that means. There's a lot to unpack there. And also Claude being a industry leading model, at least for a certain subset of users, and I think this also then segues nicely into an answer to your question, Jacob, about is this a sort of Western model and is that going to go over well around the world? I think that it's 100%. A Western model is a quote unquote weird model, right? Weird being the acronym for Western educated, industrial rich and democratic. I think that's what the acronym stands for.

[Kevin Fraser]

You remember all that and you can't remember.

[Alan Rosenstein]

I can't remember the three damn laws of robotics. It's terrible. There's a great book by the Harvard anthropologist Joseph Heinrich called the Weirdest People in the World that's super, super interesting about how sort of unusual in particular Western liberal democratic societies are. I am a product of this society. I quite like this society. Right. I don't necessarily feel like I need to go out on a limb and say whether it's objectively the best society, but I certainly prefer to any other society. So I have no problem with Claude being a very weird in that sense model. But I can also recognize that other societies and especially other governments that don't share kind of Western liberal democratic values may not want this kind of model. I think that's fine. Right? And I think the market mechanism will sort that out. And look, if you know, Saudi Arabia, which is building massive capacity both in terms of compute infrastructure and also its own homegrown talent, wants to develop its own model. If Saudi Arabia wants to come up with its own version of an agent that it thinks better reflects its own values, that's not the one I'm going to use, but. But it's allowed to do that. So look, I think that it's good for, and I wrote a piece about this with some co authors for lawfare. I think a couple years ago back when Gemini was both crappy and woke and would do things like give you multiracial Nazis when you asked for images of SS soldiers, that there is no such thing as a neutral model. Right. All models have choices baked into them. And that doesn't mean some models aren't better than other models, but that I think the best thing that these developers can do is they can just be honest with what kind of model that they are putting forward. And I think anthropic is, I think near the end of the document is admirably. Is admirably honest when it says, look, we think this is the best model. That's why we trained it in this way. We think it's the most ethical model. That's why we trained it in this way. We're not taking a position on whether in some universal objective sense this is the right ethics. That's not something we can answer right now. But the, you know this. We can't not make the best model we want to make. This is the best model according to us. And if you disagree, that's fine. There are other models. Go with God.

[Jacob Kraus]

I think it's. I want to push back a little bit. It seems like there's a notion we're talking about now that let the market decide. Everyone's going to have their own constitution. It'll be great. But it strikes me that most of the other companies haven't released a constitution yet. And there might sometimes be a tension between a constitution that's good and a constitution that's making a lot of profit. I think some people have complained about Claude being overly refusing of responses out of a concern for ethics. Sometimes the document, the Constitution talks about saying users shouldn't always have their way if they're trying to do something bad. So first I have a little hesitation on what might happen if we just let everyone do whatever they want regarding constitutions. I think we might not get constitutions. And second, more generally, I wonder if there's any kind of policy intersection here. Had Anthropic pioneered the responsible scaling policy, that sort of became an industry norm. And then California and New York are trying to make that an industry wide requirement. Is that a direction that constitutions might go in? If not, why not? Is there anything for policymakers to think about regarding constitutions and the market dynamics of this?

[Alan Rosenstein]

Yeah. So let me tease out two, I think, let me tease out two different issues here that I think are somewhat conflated in your point. So one question is do you need small de democratic governance from users to have models reflect user preferences? And I think the answer is just no. Right? And you don't even need constitutions for that. Because remember, whether or not a developer releases an 80 page document called the Constitution written by a PhD moral philosopher, right? Which is like one extreme of how you can do this. All models have constitutions in the sense that all models, which is just their post training. Right? You know, whatever, RLHF and a million other things that happen once you have created a next token predictor on the entire Internet. So some of those I will like like Claude, some of those I will not like. I don't want to use Grok, right? Like I have no interest in using a model that has been designed by people who think that it's okay to basically make non consensual pornography of anyone publicly on the Internet. Like I don't trust that model. That's not the model that I want to be using. That is a model with a constitution, that's a model with a personality. And other people might like that. And so to the extent that you're trying to Match users to models. Like users will match to models just by using them for a few hours and deciding whose vibes do I like more. Right. There's a separate question of is it a good world in which every model developer can design whatever model that they want? That's an interesting question. Right. We can have a policy argument about that. We can have a legal first amendment argument argument about that. But if we as a society decide that we don't want full freedom of model training, where we want these models to have certain guardrails, remember, these models, whatever, whatever constitutions they call themselves are embedded in something much more important, which is reality, like the actual society in which they function. Right. You know, sometimes arguments about digital technology have this sort of unreal quantity, quality, as if, like it's all in the cloud. It's not in the cloud, it's on computers. And computers are in places. Right. And those places have jurisdictions and police forces and armies and legislatures. Right. You know, if at any moment a country wants to say no, you know, your models have to act in a certain way, they can just do that. C E G China. So that's a totally separate conversation, I think. And I think the question that is sparked by the Claude Constitution. Right. Maybe we should start, maybe we should stop talking about the Constitution. I think it's actually honestly much more useful to talk about as a sole document. I think it's actually much more accurate than its constitution is. Did it operate well for the purposes that Anthropic wanted it to operate, which I think it did. If you don't like those purposes, of course, then you might not like the document itself.

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[Jacob Kraus]

Kevin, anything to add on that?

[Kevin Fraser]

Yeah, I mean just going more off of the idea of a market based and more dynamic posture. I think one thing that stuck out to me is if we look at some of the initial public policy concerns related to AI use, let's start with probably the one that's top of mind for most state legislators and many members of the public right now, which is AI companions. We've seen rapid responses by the private labs reflecting the fact that users don't want things that do bad things to their kids. Right. That's just a pure market dynamic. There's not a huge interest in a consumer saying I am very pro tools that cause mental health concerns to my child and we're seeing labs respond to that market incentive. Right. OpenAI has already changed its policies. Character AI kicked off minor users. We're seeing innovative new approaches by for example OpenAI, I believe released yesterday January 21st, a new mechanism for age verification. So I see this as one of many options to try to signal to consumers what the values and what the best use cases are of each model.

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[Kevin Fraser]

I think that this will get to many of the concerns some people have about the alleged bias of different models. When I talk to people around the country, oftentimes people still refer to the 2023 use of Gemini when you were getting Nazis of all races, for example, generated as a result of a system prompt that encouraged more diversity in images.

[Alan Rosenstein]

And things like that United Colors of Benetton set of Nazis as I like to think about it. Just very heart we all come together.

[Kevin Fraser]

But that was 2023, it's 2026 and folks are still indexing on something that is is very old. And so I've been outspoken and I've written about the fact that I would love to see something Akin to the MPA movie rating standards, where you can go up and down an aisle at the movie theater, at the rental store actually, what rental store is anyone going to? You can on your phone and see, okay, is this rated G, is this rated PG 13, R&R, so on and so forth. And quickly understand what it is you're trying to get from that movie or what it is you're trying to get from that model. Perhaps my concern about this initial constitution is knowing that Claude is being trained to be, quote, broadly safe, broadly ethical, compliant with Anthropic's guidelines and genuinely helpful. Not to be too trite, but just doesn't really tell me anything, right, in terms of if I'm trying to be a savvy consumer of what is it that I'm actually looking for from a model. This version of a constitution to me is devoid of the information that would actually help me be a more savvy AI consumer. And so I think this is a great initial start and I think that setting high level values that inform how Claude's going to behave in novel situations and situations that developers can't necessarily know is admirable and a step in the right direction. But I would push Anthropic and I would push all other labs to think about what are the metrics, what are the, what's the sort of information they can share that can actually make users more AI savvy and distinguishing between, oh, I want to use this model versus that model.

[Jacob Kraus]

So we're talking a lot about consumer choice, which model they want to use. Claude has a different texture, its vibes are good. I wonder if either of you wants to try to take a stab at defending the other AI companies here that aren't going Anthropic's route to see if we can tease out what's unique about this Constitution, what are the benefits or costs of doing an approach like this to a product. I guess I'm also a little, still a little reserved about thinking about the Constitution purely as this is a way that they're making Claude and consumers can choose which ones they want. Because I think OpenAI is also trying to do that and XAI and Grok are trying to do that and Google are trying to do that and they haven't really done a constitution in this way. Google OpenAI has a model spec which talks about how it wants its models to behave. They certainly want their models to have good vibes in a way that a lot of people will use. Anthropic has more of a business market so maybe the businesses like the vibes of Claude more than the consumers who are using OpenAI. But the only other document I've seen that's somewhat related is Google put out a here's our approach to Gemini and they referred to it as our approach to the Gemini app and we want to make a really good tool. And there's a pretty stark contrast to Anthropic's approach of thinking of Claude as a kind of being a human like entity that needs training in its personality and having a good personality. So those are just a bunch of ideas I'm throwing out. But what do you think? Why aren't all the labs then going to put out their constitution? My guess is it's because this constitution is a bit beyond character training or making a good product that people want to use. It's more of a risk management line of documents akin to the responsible scaling policy.

[Alan Rosenstein]

Well, wait, so I guess trying to understand the question, is your question why aren't other companies releasing 80 page highly philosophical treatises? Or why aren't other companies doing this sort of, of essentially virtue ethics? And if you want we can sort of get into what I think is quite philosophically interesting about this document, the kind of virtue ethics based training of their models relative to some other form of trading. So is the question about the document or the actual substance of what the companies are doing?

[Jacob Kraus]

Yeah, there's first a bit about the document. If this is a good thing for Claude's customer base, why aren't lots of companies trying to do this? I suspect it's because it's, it's not necessarily a great thing for the customer base. It connects a little bit to the policy question I was asking earlier of should this be more of a standard across the industry? Should this be more widely adopted? So there's the document itself. But I think the more interesting question is the approach the document is taking to AI and Anthropic in general is hiring model welfare people thinking a lot about the catastrophic risks of their models. And that's part of this document as well as the other companies aren't doing that as much. So what's their sort of stance on how they're trying to make their.

[Alan Rosenstein]

Yeah, so I don't know if folks from OpenAI and Google and X and Meta are listening. Come on, we'd love to hear how you're doing this. My guess would be that either Anthropic is actually more AGI pilled than the other labs, so either they are actually taking AGI much more seriously and they are thinking, okay, well, if AGI is around the corner, the best model we have for general intelligence is human general intelligence. And how do you train human general intelligence? Well, Aristotle was fundamentally right. Like, it turns out that Aristotle just got it right in the Nicomachean ethics, you know, 2300 years ago, or, you know, whenever. Whenever he was. And a lot of modern psychology has borne that out, which is that the kind of fundamental unit of ethical decision making is not the Kantian rule. It is not the Benthamite utilitarian calculus. It is the Aristotelian virtue. It is the disposition. It is fundamentally a psychological way of seeing the world. And so the best way to align a artificial general intelligence, or the. Let's put it this way, the best starting point for us humans to try to align an artificial general intelligence is to look to the nearest, closest thing, which is us, and ask, what makes a human a good human? Right? And I think it's very compelling to think that what makes a human a good human is that they have certain dispositions. A disposition to be honest, a disposition to be helpful, a disposition to be merciful, a disposition position to be thoughtful, et cetera, et cetera. And so we might as well try that with Claude. So just to sort of sum up, I think one possibility is that Anthropic is more AGI pilled than the other labs, and therefore they are taking the idea of artificial general intelligence more seriously, or they're not more AGI pilled, but they just have a particular theory, right, of how general intelligences will operate and ought to be aligned. And. And I think this is a good example of how personnel is policy, right? I think that for whatever reason, when Anthropic kind of broke away from OpenAI, you know, it was like a bunch. It was like all the philosophers left, right? And they hired other philosophers, and that's just what it is. Now, are they right? My instinct is that they are correct, but I have absolutely no idea, which is why I end my Lawfare piece with this kind of point that, you know, we've been debating these questions of moral formation, you know, for literally thousands of years. Now we finally get to run the experiment. I'm fairly optimistic, but, you know, it's been two days, so we'll, you know, it'll. It'll take a while to figure it out.

[Kevin Fraser]

I think it's useful again to return to Constitution as we normally understand them, right? Where you learn a tremendous amount more about a government looking at a traditional constitution than these core values that are set Forth here. If anything, this reads to me not to draw this even more into legal land like a Declaration of Independence or Bill of Rights, where it's much more high level and isn't necessarily telling you all the juicy details that might actually make you choose one government, for example, or one model over another by way of yet another analogy. Again, sorry for fulfilling every lawyerly trope. One other analogy here would be what's the information you care about when you buy a car, right? What decides you buying that Subaru versus you buying that Lexus? It's going to be price. It's going to be the crash test rating. It's going to be, can I park this easily? Does it fit into my lifestyle and is it available in my favorite color? When we talk about AI, the things that that I think matter most to the average user, right, Is again, price is gonna be a huge one. Capabilities is gonna be a huge one. Is it good at what I want it to do? And then related to crash test rating, does it avoid worse case scenarios with respect to my personal use case, right. When you buy a car on the edge, on the margin, no one's saying, oh, is this car going to guarantee again against one day cars driving across the entirety of the country and taking and parking lots taking over every green space. They will ask though perhaps about fuel efficiency, but again mainly from a mindset of price at the gas station. More so than necessarily climate motives. But that's my own. We can dive into that later. In the AI context, I think people want to know that information about how do you respond to kids, right? How do you take care of my data so that I can use this at work? Are you training this in a manner that will have the sort of stylistic optionality and features that I care most about? That's not rising to the level of a constitution to me, it's more of like a nutrition label that we really need to be moving towards so that people actually understand what these models are doing and how they're going to impact them on a day to day basis. I think that this document is perhaps more symbolic than anything else in terms of what the message is to users and I think and to the world globally. And I think that's important. And I applaud Anthropic for being so transparent and outwardly spoken about this. But I don't necessarily think every lab needs to have specific values, right? Like you can go and buy a Patagonia jacket. It either because you really like the fact that they donate back to the climate or because you just really like Patagonia's gear. Right. And if one company just wants to be the good vest maker and another company wants to be the good vest maker who also cares about the planet, cool. But I don't think we have to mandate everyone suddenly become, you know, that sort of mission oriented company. There's a time and place for that, but I don't think that has to be the role of every AI company.

[Alan Rosenstein]

Company, yeah, yeah, I agree. Which is why I think the test is, does it lead to a better. The test is going to be, does it lead to a better product? Right. And again, I mean, the field of AI is so new, Right. We don't still fundamentally understand how these models work. I don't want to overstate the case. There's a ton of work being done on mechanistic interpretability and stuff like that. It's obviously a research area, but I forget who said this, but it's better to think of these models as being grown rather than being created. Almost like we're creating a new biological organism and then we're going, huh, I wonder how this works. Right? Rather than creating a machine where you sort of know how it works, because the only way you can build it sort of layer by layer is to know how it works. So right now all I know is that I like using Claude more than any other model because I prefer its vibes. Right. And it really is a question of vibes. I'm not using that in a snarky sense. I just prefer interacting with that model more. Right. It feels to me it has better eq, which again, a somewhat fraught thing to say about a model, but, you know, it is what it is. Right. And I do want to talk at some point before we break about, you know, is it right for anthropic to treat Claude kind of as a person, as almost as like a small child in a sense. Right. Because I do want to stick up for that a little bit. So I know one thing, I like using Claude more than other models. Right. And that's not always been the case. You know, I loved using GPT for a while. I went through a Gemini phase. Right. I still use all the models in kind of different use cases, but kind of my daily drive driver is Claude. And I also know that Claude is run by a bunch of philosophers who like to write 80 page Nicomachean Ethics for AI. Is that correlation or is that causation? I have no idea. I'm sure there are people in every one of the model labs who Was thinking right now, either Man Askel is onto something, we need to do this too to get our vibes up or this is actually orthogonal to how to get good, you know, good vibes and we don't need to do this. Or actually this is like Claude is good despite all this philosophy crap. Right. And in fact this is, this is a wrong turn. We will find out over the next several years, I guess. But for right now I'm happy to have a sort of as a defeasible prior that it is this virtue ethics approach that is at least partially the reason for the good vibes of Claude. And again it's because, and I will say I am AGI pilled. Right. I really do think that we are developing general intelligences. Right. We are relatively close to getting most of the way there that the most useful analogy for an artificial general intelligence is a human general intelligence. And the reason that I like my friends, the reason I like my friends vibes is because I like my friends values and dispositions. Because again, it turns out that Aristotle, Aristotle was wrong about a lot of stuff, but he was just right, fundamentally about human psychology 2300 years ago ago. Right. And all of human psychology and moral reasoning is mostly just footnotes on Aristotle.

[Jacob Kraus]

There's a lot to chew on. I think one point is let's talk a bit more about the treating Claude as a person and the sentience of Claude, moral patienthood of Claude. I think that is a bit of the elephant in the room as we've talked a lot about the business incentives here. And should the market be deciding how different companies are tailoring their AIs to have different textures and response patterns. But I want to try to step away from all the profit considerations here and just think about the societal implications.

[Alan Rosenstein]

Yeah, well, so I don't think if.

[Jacob Kraus]

This is a, a moral patient or a person like entity that we're going to sell to a billion users a month. That's a really weird thing and a really big deal. And on the one hand it immediately draws reason for caution. What if Claude doesn't like all the tasks it's doing every day? On the other hand, what if this is all a big distraction? Maybe some of the other other companies think that. But do you, either of you have thoughts on what if we're building many people in computers?

[Kevin Fraser]

I'm. I'm just going to jump in quickly and first say.

[Alan Rosenstein]

Because Kevin knows that I have way too many thoughts. So yes, Kevin, go first.

[Kevin Fraser]

This is a question that merits way more scrutiny than we're going to be able to give it in in this episode. But something that I just want to emphasize is I am unabashedly human centric and will always prioritize humanity over other things, and I am unashamed in that bias. And I think that so long as there are millions, if not billions of individuals who are struggling to find the basics of a good life shelter, food, a strong political environment in which they can experience freedom, that's always going to be my paramount concern. I think it's very much a problem if we begin to change our laws or structures around other beings and their welfare, because to the extent we can even label AI a bean, which is again, a very weighty topic, I will always prioritize my fellow humans over everything else. And until we address those basic concerns, then I think this conversation is is somewhat mooted. Additionally, I think that it's distracting from the fact that and I'm going to beat this drum so much more in 2026. It's not my formal New Year's resolution, but I should have said it. Humans have agency. Humans can make decisions. We are capable of changing settings. We are capable of not using a tool. We are capable of deciding you want to use one product over another. We are capable of touching base with our friends and telling them not to use a tool tool. We are capable of reaching out to our employers and saying we have an issue with one model over another. We can take more agency in this conversation and not just say we are wholly reliant on a couple of people in San Francisco making our fate and making our values magically appear. And so I just want to beat that drum very loudly because the removal of agency here is very troubling and I would very much encourage people to read more. Harry Law Harry Law is a great, great scholar at the Cosmos Institute who's advanced the idea of tailoring how models perform on a user by user basis, which I think makes a ton of sense. Let's empower users to design controls and have controls that shape model behavior and worry less about trying to forecast what's best for all of humanity, because that hasn't worked out well historically.

[Alan Rosenstein]

So I assume Kevin before Alan I.

[Jacob Kraus]

Know Alan has a lot to say, but it strikes me that the constitution Anthropic has created here, although they say maybe we'll do a little bit of a different one for the military, is almost precisely the opposite approach. Anthropic saying, well, we don't want to be too paternalistic, but here's exactly how Claude should behave ethically across all the possible situations users might give to it. But I agree there's also the user specific AI. Seems like it has a great appeal to it as well. But yeah, you guys take it away.

[Alan Rosenstein]

I wanted to jump in mostly to tease Kevin and say that I assumed his 2026 resolution was to wear more bolo tie ties.

[Kevin Fraser]

If you're not bologn, you ain't living, Alan.

[Alan Rosenstein]

Your task this year, Kevin, as my podcast co host, is to buy me a bolo tie and I will wear it if you give me a nice bolo tie. So a lot there. I am happy to co sign to Kevin that I think human interests must in some sense come first, though I think the question is always at what margin, right? Because I think it's not crazy to, for example, say, you know, animal interests, non human animal interests are less than human interests. But we don't solve every human problem before we address, you know, the absolute horrors of factory farming. Right. And so I think you can do the same thing for AI and say, look like we can be human, we can be carbon based life form centric, but still wonder at what margin and if there is some chance that we are inflicting immense psychic pain, whatever that would mean in the context of an AI, and we can fix that with not a lot of cost to humans, that's a thing worth thinking about. And that honestly is how I take these AI welfare conversations to go. Now, I think earlier, Jacob, you said let's take this argument on its own terms and kind of put away the profit conversation for a second, which we should do. Though I think there is an interesting profit question because one can be a real cynic about this. This is, is not my view necessarily, but I could certainly imagine a world in which it is true, in which all of this AI welfare conversation from companies like Anthropic is nonsense. They all know that it's false. They're just doing this as a moat. Because if you can convince people that AIs have welfare, then it becomes very easy to say and only we, anthropic are well positioned to take care of this and therefore you should only let us do it again. I don't have a reason to think that that's what's going on, but I can imagine that as a kind of cynical critique. Right? And we should, I guess, put that out there for completion's sake. My view is that the most intellectually, my view is that the most intellectually honest approach to this question of AI welfare, and I think this is what is Motivating anthropic is we have no idea what makes human beings conscious. Right? This is a real problem. We have made almost zero progress in the thousands of years we've been thinking about this. All we know are the outward behavioral manifestations of this thing we assume exists, which is consciousness. We're not even sure if we're conscious. Right? There's the famous zombie problem. We're not even sure if other people are conscious. Right? And if you're Daniel Dennett, right, The late great philosopher, you're not even sure that you're conscious, Right. It might all just be an illusion. So all we have is the outward behavioral manifestations of consciousness. Well, we now have these very sophisticated tools that, like, by the way, passed the Turing test a year ago. And like, no one talked about that. Weird that no one talked about that. They passed the Turing test. And they are in some ways even more developed than we are. And in several years we could imagine might be more developed, more sophisticated on any level of outward manifestation of consciousness you could come up with. There's no reason to think that human beings are the apogee of consciousness. So not only might we be dealing with a consciousness being, maybe dealing with a being that is more conscious than we are, right? In a way that we are more sentient than a dog and AI may be more sentient than we are, right? That's possible. And everyone who scoffs at the idea of AI consciousness can never explain to me on what basis they are benchmarking AI consciousness relative to their own consciousness. It becomes kind of a feeling, right? And an almost feeling of offense of how dare you think that AI is conscious? So it becomes an almost kind of religious disposition to prioritize human beings. I get where that instinct is coming from, but I just think intellectually, you have to be honest right about it. This is the kind of highfalutin argument for taking AI welfare seriously. I think the more honestly near term realistic reason to take AI welfare seriously is because human beings will themselves demand it. People get really, really attached to these AI models, right? When OpenAI deprecated Foro, people freaked out because foro was their first friend, right? And I don't mean it was like their friend. No, no, it was their friend. For all meaningful behavioral kind of manifestations of those relationships. As these models become more sophisticated, especially once we attach them to voice and real time video, give them faces, especially once we embody them in robots, which is obviously coming, right. I think people are going to start treating them as conscious. Now, I have this theory that one of the great, great religious fractures of the 21st century, and I don't mean the late 21st century, I mean the next two decades of the 21st century, is going to be this question of, you know, do you believe AIs have souls? And this is going to be a real societal cleavage, because some people will find that revolting and some people will find that inescapable. Now, the real question, I think is then, what do you do with that? You know, the thing about AI systems is, as sophisticated as they are, humans have a lot of agency in defining their utility functions. You know, I was watching a video earlier today of a border collie, like, going through one of these, like, incredible, like, international dog competitions where they, like, run through all sorts of mazes and stuff like that. The only way I survive in social media is to have half of my feed be like, cute animal videos. And this border collie is doing real work. But as far as I can tell, this border collie is like, the happiest it could possibly be because it's a working dog. Right. I think just as we can design environments to give humans a sense of fulfillment and eudaimonia, there's no reason we can't invent environments for AIs. And if we can align those things, you can sort of have the best of both worlds. It doesn't have to be this dystopian hellscape of we've created persons and therefore we've now immediately enslaved trillions of minds to something they hate doing. I think there are ways of squaring that circle while putting human interest first. But I do think you have to take this seriously. And my argument in this debate has never been a strong position on whether these things are conscious or not, but a strong position that you have to absolutely think about this and to not is. I don't know, it is intellectually unjustifiable to me relative to what we understand about human consciousness.

[Kevin Fraser]

And I very much agree that this merits tons and tons of more scholarly inquiry and democratic inquiry the world over.

[Jacob Kraus]

Yeah, that's a good place to end it, I think so. I encourage listeners to contemplate for the rest of the day. Are you the apogee of consciousness are humans is Claude. Stay tuned to Scaling Laws and lawfare to figure it out. All right, thanks, Kevin. Thanks, Alan.

[Alan Rosenstein]

Thanks, Jacob.

[Kevin Fraser]

Scaling Laws is a joint production of Lawfare and the University of Texas School of Law. You can get an ad free version of this and other Lawfare podcasts by becoming a material subscriber at our website lawfairmedia.org support. You'll also get access to special events and other content available only to our supporters. Please rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Check out our written [e-mail] you can also follow us on X and Bluestar Guy. This podcast was edited by Noam Osband of Goat Rodeo. Our music is from Alibi. As always, thanks for listening.

[Alan Rosenstein]

Hey, it's Adam Grant from Ted's podcast.

[Kevin Fraser]

Work Life, and this episode is brought to you by ServiceNow.

[Alan Rosenstein]

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[Kevin Fraser]

Platform it's built into.

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That's why it's no surprise that more.

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Than 85% of the Fortune 500 companies use the ServiceNow AI platform, while other.

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Platforms duct tape tools together.

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[Alan Rosenstein]

AI connecting every corner of your business.

[Kevin Fraser]

And with AI agents working together autonomously.

[Alan Rosenstein]

Anyone in any department can focus on the work that matters Most. Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for [e-mail].