Short answers, pulled from the story.
Amanda Askell is a Scottish philosopher and AI researcher who currently serves as the head of the personality alignment team at Anthropic. In this role, she is responsible for training the Claude model to exhibit positive character traits such as curiosity and empathy.
Amanda Askell co-authored the GPT-3 paper which was published as a pre-print on the 28th of May 2020 while she was a Research Scientist at OpenAI. She had joined OpenAI in November 2018 to work on the policy team before leaving the organization in 2021.
Amanda Askell left OpenAI in 2021 due to concerns that the company was not prioritizing AI safety enough. This decision defined the trajectory of her career and led her to join Anthropic in March 2021 to work on alignment and finetuning.
Amanda Askell earned a PhD in Philosophy from New York University in 2018 with a thesis titled Pareto Principles in Infinite Ethics. Her doctoral work argued that rankings of worlds containing infinitely many agents create puzzles for ethical theories when constrained by plausible axioms.
Constitutional AI is a method for training AI systems to meet standards of harmlessness and helpfulness using AI feedback rather than extensive human oversight. The latest version of Claude's constitution was released in January 2026 with Amanda Askell as the primary author responsible for the majority of the text.