Constitutional Agents in Agentic Chatbot Teams
As we accelerate the deployment of GenAI, the use of Constitutional Agents within agentic chatbot teams is emerging as a good strategy for embedding ethical oversight into the very fabric of AI systems. These agents can act as key component of the system’s ethical guardrails, ensuring alignment with predefined core principles while adapting to the nuances of real-world interactions.
In practice, this involves centralizing constitutional oversight with a dedicated Constitution Agent embedded in the moderation and safety sub-teams. This agent can operate both in real-time—evaluating outputs synchronously to prevent policy breaches—and retrospectively, analyzing logs for patterns, biases, and ethical challenges. And it doesn’t have to work alone; a layered review system allows other agents to critique outputs autonomously before the Constitution Agent provides a second tier of evaluation.
The principles guiding these agents do not have to be generic either; they could reflect both broad ethical ideals and domain-specific rules, tailored to the chatbot’s (meaning its creators’) purpose. For example:
Empathy: Acknowledging user concerns and emotions.
Clarity: Delivering actionable and understandable responses.
Privacy-first: Avoiding unnecessary data collection or sharing.
What can make this approach even more transformative would be proactive embedding of principles into the training process. Using reinforcement learning and supervised learning, the chatbot’s behavior can align with these constitutional values from inception, resulting in AI systems that don’t just answer questions but also respect those defined principles.
For AI teams, adopting a Constitutional AI (CAI) framework means rethinking governance at every level—from defining clear, actionable ethical guidelines to empowering Constitution Agents with the authority to override or amend outputs when necessary (sometimes with humans-in-the-loop). It’s about balancing technological ambition with responsibility, ensuring our creations serve us ethically and effectively. Work done on CAI by Anthropic, and also by Collective Intelligence Project, is helping pave the way to open such discussions and prompting AI teams to consider such angles.
The future of AI doesn’t just depend on what we build but how we choose to guide it—a lesson learned from human history. Complexity of group dynamics, such as the early formation of extended families and then tribes, gave rise to constitutional principles being adopted early on in human societies, without which humans may have never learned to evolve ever more complex societies. The deployment of these first-wave of constitutional agents would parallel that aspect of human development, on the way toward ever more complex agentic systems.