This week, the New Yorker published a profile of the woman who wrote the document that governs how Claude thinks. Her name is Amanda Askell. Inside Anthropic, she calls it a soul.

Jill Lepore traces how Claude got a constitution because constitutional democracy stopped working — from the Capitol insurrection to the Pentagon ban to a thirty-seven-year-old philosopher writing thirty thousand words of moral precepts for an AI system now being used to wage war.

Sources:

• Jill Lepore, "Does A.I. Need a Constitution?" — The New Yorker (March 30, 2026)
• Fortune — Judge Rita Lin ruling on Anthropic ban (March 26, 2026)
• Gideon Lewis-Kraus, "The Pentagon Went to War with Anthropic" — The New Yorker

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