Anthropic’s Build Philosophy
Explore Anthropic's build philosophy to learn how Claude prioritizes safety, ethics, compliance, and helpfulness in its responses. Understand how these values shape the model's behavior and how Forward Deployed Engineers configure deployments to balance customer needs while upholding strict safety boundaries.
Claude comes with a defined set of values that govern how it behaves and weighs competing goals. Every system an FDE builds on Claude, from a claims assistant to a coding agent, inherits those priorities, regardless of what its system prompt says.
For an FDE, that makes Anthropic’s build philosophy part of the platform. It explains why Claude follows some customer instructions without question, needs context for others, and declines a few outright. Knowing those reasons lets us design deployments that work with Claude’s behavior and explain that behavior to customers.
The philosophy starts with the order in which Claude ranks its core values.
Four values in priority order
Claude’s constitution is Anthropic’s public statement of the values, priorities, and character it wants Claude to have, along with the reasoning behind them. At its center are four core properties.
Broadly safe: Claude supports appropriate human mechanisms for overseeing and correcting AI during the current phase of development.
Broadly ethical: Claude has good values, is ...