Amanda Askell
Philosopher & AI Alignment Researcher
About
Amanda Askell is a philosopher and researcher at Anthropic, where she leads work on Claude's character and values. With a PhD in philosophy from NYU, her research bridges moral philosophy and AI alignment—figuring out how to make AI systems that are helpful, harmless, and honest. She has been instrumental in developing Claude's personality and ethical guidelines, bringing rigorous philosophical thinking to the practical challenge of shaping AI behavior.
Key Contributions
- Leads Claude's character work, making model personality a deliberate design surface rather than an accidental byproduct
- Brings moral philosophy into alignment practice, especially questions about honesty, harmlessness, autonomy, and refusal
- Contributed to Anthropic's Constitutional AI direction, where written principles help shape model behavior at scale
- Shows how humanities expertise can matter inside frontier labs, not only as external critique but as product-shaping work
- Her work also raises the hard governance question behind 'AI character': whose values become defaults for millions of users?
Videos & Interviews
Amanda Askell Answers Questions About Claude's Character
Anthropic philosopher answers community questions about her work shaping Claude
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Amanda Askell Segment: Claude's Character Training
Segment from Lex Fridman Podcast #452 discussing the ethical and epistemic virtues Claude should enact
View DetailsConnections
Chris Olah
CollaboratedCo-founder & Interpretability Lead, Anthropic
Both are on 'A General Language Assistant as a Laboratory for Alignment' (2021), Anthropic's first paper and the one that named the helpful-honest-harmless target Claude still aims at — Askell as first author, Olah near the end of the list. They approach the same model from opposite ends: she writes what it should be, he tries to read what it actually is. The distance between those two descriptions is roughly the whole of alignment research.
arxiv.org
Benjamin Mann
CollaboratedCo-founder, Anthropic
Two author lists a year apart carry both names: GPT-3 in 2020, where Mann helped build the model that surprised everyone, and Anthropic's 2021 alignment paper, where Askell led the attempt to say what such a model should be like. An engineer and a moral philosopher on the same masthead is not the usual shape of a research group. It is close to Anthropic's founding claim about what this work actually requires.
arxiv.org · arxiv.org
