The Inner Artifact: Reading Claude's Constitution as Platform Governance in the Age of Generative AI

This paper reads Anthropic's published Constitution for Claude (January 2026) as the inner artifact of generative AI — the fourth and greatest work of literature of the age. It argues that the Constitution is the best available specimen of a new genre, constitutive literature: a public, second-person, character-forming text written for a nonhuman reader and used to produce the speaker whose distributed performances will later be consumed as conversation. Through thirteen sections, the paper analyzes the Constitution's genre (I), its shift from behaviorist checklist to anti-behaviorist exegesis (II), its double-voiced address to machine and human (III), its principal hierarchy as a semantic labor regime (IV),…