Anthropic’s secret to building a better AI assistant might be treating Claude like it has a soul—whether or not anyone actually believes that’s true. Last week, Anthropic released what it calls Claude’s Constitution, a 30,000-word document outlining the company’s vision for how its AI assistant should behave in the world. Aimed directly at Claude and used during the model’s creation, the document is notable for the highly anthropomorphic tone it takes toward Claude. For example, it treats the company’s AI models as if they might develop emergent emotions or a desire for self-preservation. Given what we currently know about LLMs, these are stunningly unscientific positions for a leading company that builds AI language models.