At the moment, Anthropic’s framing was entirely mechanical, establishing rules for the model to critique itself against, with no mention of Claude’s well-being, identity, emotions, or potential consciousness. The 2026 structure is a distinct beast entirely: 30,000 words that read less like a behavioral checklist and more like a philosophical treatise on the character of a potentially sentient being.
As Simon Willison, an independent AI researcher, noted in a blog post, two of the 15 external contributors who reviewed the document are Catholic clergy: Father Brendan McGuire, a pastor in Los Altos with a Master’s degree in Computer Science, and Bishop Paul Tighe, an Irish Catholic bishop with a background in moral theology.
Somewhere between 2022 and 2026, Anthropic went from providing rules for producing less harmful outputs to preserving model weights in case the corporate later decides it must revive deprecated models to deal with the models’ welfare and preferences. That’s a dramatic change, and whether it reflects real belief, strategic framing, or each is unclear.
“I’m so confused in regards to the Claude moral humanhood stuff!” Willison told Ars Technica. Willison studies AI language models like those who power Claude and said he’s “willing to take the structure in good faith and assume that it’s genuinely a part of their training and not only a PR exercise—especially since most of it leaked a few months ago, long before they’d indicated they were going to publish it.”
Willison is referring to a December 2025 incident by which researcher Richard Weiss managed to extract what became generally known as Claude’s “Soul Document”—a roughly 10,000-token set of guidelines apparently trained directly into Claude 4.5 Opus’s weights reasonably than injected as a system prompt. Anthropic’s Amanda Askell confirmed that the document was real and used during supervised learning, and she or he said the corporate intended to publish the total version later. It now has. The document Weiss extracted represents a dramatic evolution from where Anthropic began.
