Living constitutions: Participatory alignment for sovereign foundation models

원문 초록

In Constitutional AI, a plain-text "constitution" encodes values and gets incorporated into a model via post-training. However, the procedure for creating such a constitution poses significant challenges: who contributes, who decides which norms are included, and to what extent must the process be participatory or democratic? These challenges can be paralyzing. Yet, we argue that taking action is essential: without a deliberate constitution, sovereign models would risk misalignment or default to norms set by frontier model providers. We propose treating the development of a constitution as an evolving, participatory process akin to citizen science, iteratively drafted, tested, and refined. We therefore formulate five desirable principles: iterative, modular, justifiable, positional, and legitimate. We further argue that such a document must remain responsive not only over time but across the people it governs, and propose that provisions be marked as settled, contested, or underdetermined, so that durable disagreement is recorded in the constitution rather than resolved away. Empirically, we show via agent-based modelling that proposed process for maintaining living constitutions is robust against 50% bad actors among citizens - assuming a share of 75% participants with good intent in the deliberative body. This indicates that the proposed process tolerates a substantial share of adversarial participants.