A first cut of an Artificial Intelligence Constitution (github.com)

An open-source "AI Constitution" template has been released as a public-domain repository to serve as a foundational governance layer for AI systems, autonomous agents, developer platforms and multi‑persona models. The package includes a clean core constitution (constitution.md), an annotated rationale (constitution-annotated.md), and a CC0 1.0 license, and outlines core values and guiding principles alongside practical elements: behavioral directives, safety and risk policies, persona/identity rules, interaction guidelines, autonomy/agent constraints, governance and versioning frameworks, and extension modules for domain-specific rules. It’s explicitly model‑ and technology‑agnostic and designed to be embedded into system prompts, agent configs, policy layers, or documentation. This matters because it provides a ready-made, permissive governance scaffold that teams can adopt, modify, or extend without legal friction—even for commercial or closed‑source systems—potentially speeding the consistent implementation of safety guardrails across projects. Technically, the constitution can be used to codify persona behavior, limit agent autonomy, enforce interaction norms, and create upgrade/versioning workflows, enabling reproducible policy enforcement across LLMs and agent architectures. The public‑domain release lowers barriers to experimentation and interoperability, but its non‑binding nature means effectiveness will depend on how rigorously organizations integrate and enforce the templates in their systems.