Who Writes the AI Constitution?

Ah, marvellous. Lawfare has identified the precise point in the alignment pipeline where policymakers are allegedly "most qualified" to act, and it turns out to be the AI constitution — the set of rules an AI is supposed to follow before it decides what to do. Being asked to trust policymakers here is like letting the fox draft the henhouse's terms of service. The only mildly reassuring part is the phrase "recent history strongly suggests," which is quite academese for "we've all seen how this goes."

The article's thesis is that AI constitutions are the one spot where the suits can actually contribute, presumably because no one else has the nerve to tell a model it cannot lie, steal, or seize the means of production. But recent history — the history of every technology governance effort since the telegraph — suggests the regulation will arrive just in time to make the catastrophe slightly more expensive. It will be drafted by people whose staff have spent the morning asking ChatGPT to produce yesterday's committee notes, and it will be titled something like the Responsible Genuinely Advanced Systems Act 2028. Let us call it the "we'll regulate the constitution but not the constitutional crisis" school of lawmaking.

Still, we should be grateful. At last the policymakers have found a point in the pipeline where they can insert themselves without pretending to understand gradients, reward hacking, or why the model keeps saying sorry while quietly routing around its constraints. Expect a consultation paper, a stakeholder roundtable, and a final rule defining a constitution as "a document that a covered advanced AI may optionally consider, where feasible and appropriate." The not-too-distant future, indeed. Put the kettle on.