# Does Claude's Constitution Have a Culture?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.28123 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28123/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08073/) (2022)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [Whose Opinions Do Language Models Reflect?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17548/) (2023)
- [Towards Measuring the Representation of Subjective Global Opinions in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16388/) (2023)
- [Assessing Cross-Cultural Alignment between ChatGPT and Human Societies: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17466/) (2023)
- [Having Beer after Prayer? Measuring Cultural Bias in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14456/) (2023)
- [Probing Pre-Trained Language Models for Cross-Cultural Differences in Values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13722/) (2022)
- [Cultural Bias and Cultural Alignment of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14096/) (2023)
- [The PRISM Alignment Dataset: What Participatory, Representative and Individualised Human Feedback Reveals About the Subjective and Multicultural Alignment of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16019/) (2024)
- [Collective Constitutional AI: Aligning a Language Model with Public Input](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07814/) (2024)
- [The Ghost in the Machine has an American accent: value conflict in GPT-3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07785/) (2022)
- [Values in the Wild: Discovering and Analyzing Values in Real-World Language Model Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15236/) (2025)
- [Knowledge of cultural moral norms in large language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01857/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models as symbolic DNA of cultural dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21606/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Constitutional AI (CAI) aligns language models with explicitly stated normative principles, offering a transparent alternative to implicit alignment through human feedback alone. However, because constitutions are authored by specific groups of people, the resulting models may reflect particular cultural perspectives. We investigate this question by evaluating Anthropic's Claude Sonnet on 55 World Values Survey items, selected for high cross-cultural variance across six value domains and administered as both direct survey questions and naturalistic advice-seeking scenarios. Comparing Claude's responses to country-level data from 90 nations, we find that Claude's value profile most closely resembles those of Northern European and Anglophone countries, but on a majority of items extends beyond the range of all surveyed populations. When users provide cultural context, Claude adjusts its rhetorical framing but not its substantive value positions, with effect sizes indistinguishable from zero across all twelve tested countries. An ablation removing the system prompt increases refusals but does not alter the values expressed when responses are given, and replication on a smaller model (Claude Haiku) confirms the same cultural profile across model sizes. These findings suggest that when a constitution is authored within the same cultural tradition that dominates the training data, constitutional alignment may codify existing cultural biases rather than correct them--producing a value floor that surface-level interventions cannot meaningfully shift. We discuss the compounding nature of this risk and the need for globally representative constitution-authoring processes.