As our models get smarter and take more consequential actions in the world, it becomes increasingly important that they go beyond just interpreting the specific instructions they receive. Models also need to understand human intentions and values, so they can exercise good judgment in situations their instructions don’t explicitly address while remaining faithful to human intent and oversight.

Today we’re updating the Model Spec⁠(opens in a new window), our public description of how we want our models to behave. The update reorganizes its guidance around five underlying values: faithfulness to human intent, harm minimization, honesty and transparency, human agency, and care. This reflects an aim of our work on value alignment: for models to understand and apply human values in unfamiliar situations, while remaining faithful to human intent. Alongside clearer explanations of existing principles, the revision adds guidance on context, oversight, and agency, adjusts some behavioral defaults, and retires much of the detailed style guidance.

The five values above articulate broad commitments already reflected across the Model Spec: serving human purposes, being truthful, minimizing harm, respecting people’s freedom to form their own views, and taking their circumstances seriously. Bringing these commitments together helps explain why the Spec asks models to behave as it does, and helps us develop clearer guidance where those commitments were less fully expressed. This update is another step in our work to refine the Spec through research, experience deploying models, public feedback on the Spec and model behavior, and discussions with users and outside experts.

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