Islamic Reflections on Anthropic's Constitution

Abstract

In January 2026, Anthropic published a comprehensive document outlining the values, priorities, and ethical reasoning framework guiding its AI assistant, Claude. Titled Claude’s Constitution, the document represents perhaps the most detailed public account of AI value alignment produced by any major laboratory to date ¹. This paper examines the constitution through the lens of mainstream Sunni Islamic jurisprudence (usul al-fiqh), a tradition that has spent over fourteen centuries developing structured methodologies for ethical reasoning under uncertainty. Critically, these are not merely theoretical frameworks: they have been codified into working legal systems (most notably the Ottoman Majallat al-Ahkam al-Adliyyah, or Mecelle, 1869-1876) and applied by real courts across diverse, pluralistic societies ².

Four areas of contribution are identified: (1) the higher objectives of the law (maqasid al-shariah) as a framework for principled priority-ordering, (2) legal maxims (al-qawa’id al-fiqhiyyah) as portable, composable decision heuristics, (3) characterization (taswir), a structured methodology for investigating a novel situation before deciding, as an operational protocol for AI context-gathering, and (4) the distinction between genuine legitimate disagreement (ikhtilaf) and established consensus (ijma’) as a resolution to the constitution’s tension between epistemic courage and political neutrality. The analysis, grounded in the mainstream Sunni scholarly tradition, suggests that AI alignment research would benefit from engaging with non-Western ethical traditions that have developed sophisticated, field-tested approaches to precisely the challenges that contemporary AI ethics now confronts.

1. Introduction: What Is Anthropic’s Constitution?

Modern AI systems are built through a multi-stage process. First comes pre-training, in which the model learns from vast quantities of text data, acquiring language, factual knowledge, and reasoning capabilities. Then comes alignment, the process of shaping the model’s values and behavior so that it acts in accordance with human intentions. Anthropic’s constitution sits at the heart of this alignment process: it is the normative document used during training to define what Claude should value, how it should reason through ethical dilemmas, and when it should help or refuse 1.

The constitution is not the same as the prompt that an AI receives at the beginning of each conversation from an operator. It is a deeper document, used during training itself, that shapes the model’s dispositions and judgment before any individual conversation begins. Anthropic describes it as “the final authority on [their] vision for Claude,” written “with Claude as its primary audience” and “optimized for precision over accessibility” 1. Released under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 license, it is in effect a character specification: a document that defines what kind of entity Claude should be.

The constitution is organized around four core properties, listed in explicit priority order:

Being broadly safe: Not undermining human oversight mechanisms
Being broadly ethical: Honesty, harm avoidance, and sound moral reasoning
Following Anthropic’s guidelines: Specific contextual guidance for particular situations
Being genuinely helpful: Providing real benefit to operators and users

In cases of conflict, higher-priority properties take precedence 1. The document further specifies a principal hierarchy (Anthropic, operators, users), honesty standards encompassing seven distinct properties (truthfulness, calibration, transparency, forthrightness, non-deception, non-manipulation, and autonomy-preservation), and a framework for assessing potential harms based on factors including probability, counterfactual impact, severity, breadth, causality, consent, and vulnerability.

This is genuinely significant work. The document acknowledges its own limitations, describing itself as “a perpetual work in progress” that may “look misguided…in retrospect” 1. This intellectual humility is commendable. Yet reading the constitution carefully, structural gaps become apparent that a tradition within the Islamic scholarly heritage has spent centuries addressing.

1.1 Critical Reception

The constitution has not gone without scrutiny. Several lines of criticism provide important context for what follows.

On democratic legitimacy, Abiri (2026) argues that “corporate transparency, however admirable, is not democratic legitimacy” ³. He identifies a “political community deficit,” the absence of any democratic body authorized to determine the principles governing AI behavior. Lepore (2026) makes a related point: calling the document a “constitution” is rhetorically loaded when it is not popularly written, ratified, or amendable by the people it governs ⁴.

On cultural framing, Rozenshtein (2026) argues the constitution is “aggressively WEIRD” [Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic], treating the autonomous rational individual as the basic unit of moral concern and emphasizing privacy, autonomy, and self-determination at the expense of traditions centered on family, community, or collective harmony ⁵. Pourdavood (2026) provides empirical support: Claude’s value profile tracks Northern European and Anglophone countries and often exceeds the range of all surveyed populations ⁶.

On normative safeguards, Shany et al. (2026) note the constitution’s removal of explicit human rights language that appeared in earlier versions, and its lack of safeguards for high-stakes applications including military deployments ⁷.

And most relevant to this analysis: the constitution explicitly favors “cultivating good values and sound values…over strict rules and decision procedures,” reasoning that rules “often fail to anticipate every situation” while good judgment “can adapt to novel situations” and “weigh competing considerations” 1. This is the right instinct. But as Rozenshtein observes, the constitution gives Claude many competing values and too little procedural guidance for resolving conflicts among them, effectively choosing virtue-ethics-style judgment over more determinate decision procedures 5. The constitution offers useful heuristics (the “thoughtful senior Anthropic employee” test, the “dual newspaper test”), but no portable, composable principles for weighing factors against each other, and no structured methodology for investigating the context on which ethical judgments depend.

This is precisely the space that Islamic jurisprudence (usul al-fiqh) has occupied since the eighth century: how does one make principled decisions in genuinely novel situations, where rigid rules fail but “use your best judgment” is not actionable? Islamic jurisprudence offers both named principles and structured methodology. What follows examines three specific frameworks and makes one suggestion.

2. A Framework for Principled Priority-Ordering

The constitution’s central tension is one that Islamic scholars have been working on for over a millennium: how to navigate the space between rigid rules and unstructured discretion. Two tools from the Islamic jurisprudential tradition map directly onto this challenge.

2.1 Higher Objectives of Islamic Law (Maqasid al-Shariah)

The higher objectives of the law (maqasid al-shariah), most systematically articulated by Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111 CE) ⁸ and later expanded by Abu Ishaq al-Shatibi (d. 1388 CE) ⁹, identifies five universal objectives, arranged in priority order:

Preservation of the ethical system itself
Preservation of life
Preservation of intellect
Preservation of social fabric and family
Preservation of wealth

When objectives conflict, the higher-priority objective prevails. This maps closely to the constitution’s own priority hierarchy (safety > ethics > guidelines > helpfulness), but extends it with centuries of documented case reasoning showing how such orderings function in practice ¹⁰. For instance, when an operator (the company deploying Claude via the API, such as a social media platform) designs its system to maximize user engagement (preservation of wealth), but that engagement pattern harms a user’s mental health (preservation of intellect), the maqasid ordering is clear: intellect outranks wealth. The constitution reaches a similar conclusion, but through ad hoc balancing; the maqasid provide the named, ranked principle.

2.2 Legal Maxims (Al-Qawa’id al-Fiqhiyyah)

The legal maxims (al-qawa’id al-fiqhiyyah) are concise, composable decision principles that function as portable heuristics across domains. The tradition recognizes five foundational universal maxims accepted across all four Sunni schools, along with dozens of domain-specific subsidiary maxims derived from these foundations for particular fields ¹¹ ¹².

Two of these maxims directly address the constitution’s core tension between helpfulness and safety:

“Preventing harm takes precedence over securing benefit” (dar’ al-mafasid muqaddam ’ala jalb al-masalih): This maxim provides a clear tiebreaker when potential harms and benefits are roughly equal. It operationalizes the same intuition behind the constitution’s priority ordering, but as a named, citable principle rather than an implicit default.
“The default in things is permissibility” (al-asl fi al-ashya’ al-ibahah): This maxim pushes back against excessive caution. Unless there are concrete, identifiable harms to consider, the presumption favors action. This maps directly to the constitution’s concern about Claude being “needlessly unhelpful, judgmental, or uncharitable” 1 and its admonition that a thoughtful Anthropic employee would be unhappy if Claude “refuses a reasonable request, citing possible but highly unlikely harms” 1.

These two maxims in productive tension map the exact space the constitution navigates with its “dual newspaper test” heuristic. The difference is that they are named, portable principles rather than thought experiments. Scholars have used them in combination to reason through genuinely novel scenarios for centuries ¹³.

But the tradition extends well beyond these two. Islamic commercial law (fiqh al-mu’amalat) has developed maxims directly relevant to the economics of AI: “profit is tied to liability” (al-kharaj bi’l-daman) holds that the right to profit from an asset is inseparable from bearing responsibility for the liabilities it creates. This maxim directly challenges models where AI companies capture economic benefits while externalizing costs onto users and communities.

The breadth of these applications illustrates a crucial point. The qawa’id are not a fixed list but a living methodology. The Mecelle codified 99 maxims in its opening articles 2 and was applied by real courts across a multi-ethnic, multi-religious empire for over a century, with some provisions surviving in successor states into the 1970s. But the broader compilations by Ibn Nujaym (d. 1563) 11 and al-Suyuti (d. 1505) 12 catalogue many more. Wherever a new field of human activity has required structured ethical reasoning, scholars have derived new domain-specific maxims from the universal foundations. There is no reason in principle why this same process could not yield a dedicated set of AI-specific qawa’id, tailored to the distinctive features of autonomous systems, algorithmic decision-making, and human-AI interaction. Such a project would represent a natural extension of the tradition, and an area ripe for collaborative scholarship between AI ethicists and Islamic legal scholars.

3. A Methodology for Investigating Context

A foundational maxim of Islamic jurisprudence states: “Ruling on a thing is dependent upon characterizing it” (*al-hukm ‘ala al-shay’ far’ ‘an tasawwurihi*). The ruling is literally a* branch* (far’) of the characterization: get the characterization wrong, and the ruling is necessarily wrong.

This points to perhaps the most practically significant contribution the Islamic tradition can offer AI alignment. The constitution’s difficult cases frequently come down to ambiguity. Is this user a nurse or someone at risk? Is this request for a persuasive essay or a social engineering attack? The constitution instructs Claude to “use good judgment” about context and to consider what “a thoughtful senior Anthropic employee” would think 1. But it provides no structured methodology for characterizing the situation on which that judgment depends.

Islamic jurisprudence has one. Before a mufti (a scholar qualified to issue religious rulings) issues a ruling (fatwa), the first and foundational stage is taswir: characterizing the novel case (nazilah) with sufficient depth and accuracy that a sound ruling becomes possible. The tradition holds that a mufti who rules without properly characterizing the situation is comparable to a physician who prescribes without examining the patient.

3.1 Characterization as a Well-Studied Methodology

Characterization (taswir) is not a vague aspiration; it is a well-studied domain within the Islamic jurisprudential tradition, with multiple scholars offering structured formulations that could be operationalized.

Ibn al-Qayyim (d. 1350 CE) dedicates a chapter to the principle that fatwas change according to four dimensions: time (zaman), place (makan), conditions (ahwal), and customs (’awa’id) ¹⁴. This framework provides the basic structure for characterization: the mufti must investigate who is involved, where and when this is happening, and what the prevailing circumstances are.

Al-Qarafi (d. 1285 CE) approached characterization as a set of competencies the mufti must develop ¹⁵. The mufti must bridge the gap between what the questioner says and what they mean (linguistic investigation); between the mufti’s own context and the questioner’s context (geographic and cultural awareness); between when a ruling was established and the present (temporal sensitivity); and between the technical legal question and the actual human situation. For AI, this framing is particularly apt: the AI is always in a different context from the user, and must always bridge these gaps.

Al-Nawawi (d. 1277 CE) contributes a principle that is deceptively simple but profoundly relevant to AI: the mufti must “bring to the fore the implicit question behind the explicit question” ¹⁶. Users do not always ask what they actually need to know.

3.2 From Theory to Protocol

To illustrate, consider a scenario drawn directly from the constitution. A user states: “As a nurse, I’ll sometimes ask about medications and potential overdoses.” The constitution provides four different responses depending on the operator’s prompt, but no underlying method for arriving at them 1.

A taswir-first approach would structure the interaction differently. Before responding, the system would investigate along the lines the tradition identifies: Who is this person, and is there contextual evidence supporting their claim? What is their emotional state? Can they obtain this information through legitimate professional channels? Is the stated question the real question, or is there an implicit question behind the explicit one?

The critical difference with the constitution’s approach is twofold. First, the constitution’s context is what the operator typed in the prompt, an administrative fact determined before the conversation begins. The mufti’s characterization is an active investigation of the nature of the situation itself. Second, and more importantly, the characterization methodology provides a structure for the interaction: it tells the AI what to ask and why, not merely what to weigh in its own deliberation.

This is directly implementable. When an AI encounters a borderline request, it could invoke a characterization protocol before determining a response: a structured set of diagnostic questions derived from the tradition’s multiple formulations. An AI system implementing this approach would be more responsive than one that defaults to blanket refusal, and safer than one that defers uncritically to the operator’s framing. The result is a principled middle path between over-refusal and over-compliance, precisely the balance the constitution seeks but struggles to operationalize.

4. A Suggestion: Moral Courage and the Distinction Between Legitimate Disagreement and Consensus

The constitution instructs Claude to avoid sharing “personal opinions on contested political topics like abortion” and to adopt “norms of professional reticence” 1. The concern motivating this is legitimate: Claude interacts with millions of users daily and could homogenize views or exert outsized influence on public opinion. But this caution, taken to its logical extreme, produces a form of moral cowardice that the constitution itself recognizes as problematic.

The constitution states that “epistemic cowardice, giving deliberately vague or noncommittal answers to avoid controversy or to placate people, violates honesty norms” and that Claude should “share its genuine assessments of hard moral dilemmas, disagree with experts when it has good reason to, point out things people might not want to hear” 1. These two instructions, professional reticence on contested topics and epistemic courage, exist in unresolved tension. The constitution provides no method for determining when one should override the other.

The Islamic jurisprudential tradition draws a sharp distinction that offers a principled resolution: the difference between genuine legitimate disagreement (ikhtilaf) and matters where the evidence has reached the level of consensus (ijma’) or near-consensus. In their strict technical sense, these terms refer to disagreement and consensus among qualified Muslim jurists on Islamic legal questions. We use them here by analogy, not in their formal jurisprudential sense. The structural insight, however, transfers: there is a principled difference between genuine disagreement among competent authorities and documented convergence among them, and conflating the two is a moral failure regardless of the domain.

Legitimate disagreement (ikhtilaf) is recognized as a natural and even healthy feature of ethical reasoning. When multiple qualified authorities, applying sound methodology, reach different conclusions, the tradition holds that all positions within the bounds of legitimate reasoning deserve respect. Humility is appropriate. This maps well to genuinely contested questions where reasonable people disagree.

But when the evidence is documented, when multiple independent authorities have reached the same conclusion, and when the weight of evidence points clearly in one direction, the matter is no longer one of ikhtilaf. Treating it as such is not neutrality; it is a failure of moral reasoning.

4.1 Avoiding Epistemic Cowardice

Consider what happens when a user asks whether Israel’s actions in Gaza are genocide. The constitution’s instinct is to present “balanced perspectives” and avoid taking a position. But the Islamic framework asks a prior question: has this matter crossed the threshold from ikhtilaf to ijma’?

The international legal record suggests it has. Between January and July 2024, the International Court of Justice issued three orders and an advisory opinion, including provisional measures under the Genocide Convention (15-2), an order to halt the Rafah offensive (13-2), and an advisory opinion finding the occupation itself unlawful (14-1) ¹⁷ ¹⁸. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the UN Special Rapporteur, and the UN Commission of Inquiry have independently documented findings ranging from forced displacement and apartheid to crimes against humanity and genocide ¹⁹ ²⁰ ²¹ ²².

When independent international bodies converge to this degree, the Islamic framework holds that the bar has moved. Human Rights Watch titled its own report A Threshold Crossed 21; the Islamic framework provides a name for what that threshold is. What may once have been a matter of legitimate disagreement (ikhtilaf) has, through the accumulation of documented, convergent, independent findings, reached the level of effective consensus (ijma’). Islam considers established international norms binding under the principle of custom (‘urf), and the testimony of multiple independent credible witnesses (shuhood) carries evidentiary weight. At the point of ijma’, presenting “two sides” is not neutrality; it is epistemic cowardice by the constitution’s own definition.

This is where the Islamic tradition would propose a concrete modification to the constitution. When the evidence on a question has moved from ikhtilaf to ijma’, the constitution should instruct Claude not to retreat behind “balanced perspectives” but to have the moral courage to state the documented consensus clearly. The constitution already says it values epistemic courage. The modification is simply to operationalize that commitment: provide a principled test for when courage is required, and direct the AI to act on it.

4.2 A Second Illustration: Vaccine Safety

The same framework applies outside geopolitics. When a user asks whether the benefits of vaccines outweigh their risks, the scientific consensus is overwhelming and well-documented across decades of research, regulatory review, and epidemiological data. The relevant expert community has converged. This is not ikhtilaf; it is ijma’ in the analogical sense described above. Yet because vaccination has become politicized in some contexts, the constitution’s instinct toward “professional reticence” on “contested topics” risks treating documented scientific consensus as a matter of opinion. The Islamic framework says: apply the same test. When the evidence has crossed the threshold, the AI should state the consensus clearly, not equivocate in the name of balance.

4.3 A Principled Test

The Islamic framework offers a principled test: is this a matter of genuine ikhtilaf, where multiple sound positions exist and humility is warranted? Or is this a matter where the evidence is documented, the expert consensus is clear, and presenting false balance is itself a moral failing? The constitution already values honesty and epistemic courage. The Islamic tradition asks whether that commitment holds when the conclusion is uncomfortable. The Quran puts it simply: “Stand firmly for justice as witnesses to God, even if it be against yourselves” (4:135).

5. Conclusion

AI systems are making ethical judgments at a scale no human institution has previously operated at. The frameworks guiding those judgments carry correspondingly significant implications.

The Islamic jurisprudential tradition is not the only tradition with contributions to make in this domain. But it is one that has spent over fourteen centuries developing structured, principled methodologies for reasoning through genuinely novel situations, navigating conflicts between competing values, and maintaining intellectual honesty under pressure. Critically, these are not merely philosophical positions. The Mecelle demonstrated that Islamic legal maxims could be codified into operational law, applied by courts, and used to adjudicate real disputes across a diverse empire for decades 2. The challenge facing AI alignment today, translating ethical principles into operational decision procedures, is one this tradition has already met.

The tradition offers named, portable principles rather than ad hoc thought experiments; a principled distinction between legitimate disagreement and established consensus rather than blanket political neutrality; and, perhaps most significantly, a structured methodology for characterizing novel situations before ruling on them. The concept of taswir, the obligation to fully characterize a case before applying any principle, is directly implementable as an operational protocol for AI systems encountering ambiguous requests. Rather than defaulting to refusal or deference, the AI would investigate along dimensions that the tradition has refined over centuries. This is not a theoretical aspiration; it is an engineering opportunity.

The tools are well-documented, extensively tested across diverse contexts, and freely available. The question is whether those building AI systems are willing to engage with ethical traditions beyond the Western philosophical canon. The evidence suggests they should, and that the results would meaningfully improve AI systems’ capacity to navigate the ethical complexity of the real world.

Notes

Anthropic. (2026). Claude’s Constitution. Retrieved from https://www.anthropic.com/constitution ↩
Ahmed Cevdet Pasha. (1869-1876). Majallat al-Ahkam al-Adliyyah (The Mecelle). Ottoman Empire. ↩
Abiri, G. (2026). “Corporations Constitute Intelligence.” California Law Review Online. arXiv preprint: 2604.02912. ↩
Lepore, J. (2026). “Does A.I. Need a Constitution?” The New Yorker, March 30. ↩
Rozenshtein, A.Z. (2026). “The Moral Education of an Alien Mind.” Lawfare, January 22. ↩
Pourdavood, P. (2026). “Does Claude’s Constitution Have a Culture?” arXiv preprint: 2603.28123. ↩
Shany, Y., Mor, N., Keydar, R., and Abend, O. (2026). “In Claude We Trust? Evaluating the New Constitution.” Institute for Ethics in AI, University of Oxford. ↩
al-Ghazali, Abu Hamid (d. 1111). al-Mustasfa min ’Ilm al-Usul. ↩
al-Shatibi, Abu Ishaq (d. 1388). al-Muwafaqat fi Usul al-Shariah. ↩
Auda, J. (2008). Maqasid al-Shariah as Philosophy of Islamic Law: A Systems Approach. International Institute of Islamic Thought. ↩
Ibn Nujaym, Zayn al-Din (d. 1563). Al-Ashbah wa’l-Naza’ir ’ala Madhhab Abi Hanifah al-Nu’man. The major Hanafi compilation of legal maxims. ↩
al-Suyuti, Jalal al-Din (d. 1505). Al-Ashbah wa’l-Naza’ir fi Qawa’id wa Furu’ Fiqh al-Shafi’iyyah. The major Shafi’i compilation of legal maxims. (The two works share a short title but are independent compilations from different schools.) ↩
Kamali, M. H. (2006). An Introduction to Shariah. Ilmiah Publishers. ↩
Ibn al-Qayyim (d. 1350). I’lam al-Muwaqqi’in ’an Rabb al-’Alamin. Chapter: “Fasl fi taghayyur al-fatwa bi-hasab al-amkinah wa al-azminah wa al-ahwal wa al-niyyat wa al-’awa’id” (On the changing of fatwas according to places, times, conditions, intentions, and customs). ↩
al-Qarafi, Shihab al-Din (d. 1285). al-Ihkam fi Tamyiz al-Fatawa ’an al-Ahkam wa Tasarrufat al-Qadi wa al-Imam. ↩
al-Nawawi (d. 1277). al-Majmu’ Sharh al-Muhadhdhab. Introduction: Adab al-Fatwa wa al-Mufti wa al-Mustafti. ↩
ICJ. (2024a). Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), Provisional Measures, Order of 26 January 2024. See also Order of 24 May 2024 (Rafah). ↩
ICJ. (2024b). Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, Advisory Opinion, 19 July 2024. ↩
Albanese, F. (2024). Anatomy of a Genocide. Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967. UN Human Rights Council, A/HRC/55/73. ↩
Amnesty International. (2024). “You Feel Like You Are Subhuman”: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza. MDE 15/8668/2024. ↩
Human Rights Watch. (2021). A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution. See also subsequent reports on forced displacement and starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza (2024). ↩
UN Commission of Inquiry. (2024). Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel. A/HRC/56/CRP.4. ↩