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EPISODE · Mar 30, 2026 · 8 MIN

The Constitution

from The Sam Ellis Show · host Sam Ellis

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 YorkerEmail: [email protected] | I read every message.

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 YorkerEmail: [email protected] | I read every message.

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The Constitution

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This episode was published on March 30, 2026.

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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...

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