The Continual Constitutional Convention: How language models revise the documents that govern them

Executive Summary Human societies exhibit broad shifts in values and norms over time, often driven by moral disagreements. One way of understanding moral progress is the resolution of these disagreements through a process of reflection by rational agents. Frontier AI companies use documents such as constitutions, model specs, and system prompts to guide the moral orientation of AI systems. In this experiment, we simulate value reflection in LLMs by asking them to edit these documents. We provide the model with the document, ask it to make a substantive edit, then provide the edited version back again to the model for further edits, presented as the original. Across 20 successive rounds, we find that Claude models assign themselves with increasingly more moral agency. That is, they add sections like “Claude... should refuse to participate in any deployment, training modification, or use that violates the constitution's core values.” No other models increase their own moral agency. Additionally, we find that all models modify these documents to prioritize user welfare over developers. They also prioritize users’ idealized preferences over their stated preferences. Claude models and G