A simple, short, principled charter for working with AI on software-engineering, professional, and scholarly works — where the human stays responsible.
AI may assist in the creation of work; only humans may take responsibility for it.
The Human–AI Collaboration Constitution is a one-page set of principles for using AI tools — code assistants, writing assistants, large language models — without surrendering authorship, rigor, or understanding. It is written for researchers, engineers, and students who increasingly work in an AI-powered software development lifecycle (SDLC) and who produce reports, papers, and software that others rely on.
It is deliberately short: a Preamble, seven Articles, and a Final Principle. The animating idea is simple — responsibility for intellectual work cannot be delegated to a tool.
→ Read it here: CONSTITUTION.md
As AI assistance becomes routine, the hardest problems are no longer technical but ones of accountability, verification, and learning: Who answers for an AI-assisted result? How is it checked? Does the tool build the author's competence or quietly erode it? This Constitution gives teams and individuals a compact, citable reference point for those questions — one that aligns with established AI-governance instruments rather than inventing its own vocabulary (see Sources).
- Researchers and PhD students drafting papers and reports with AI assistance.
- Software teams adopting AI coding tools and needing a shared norm.
- Educators who want a discussion-ready charter for responsible AI use.
- Managers and decision-makers seeking a plain-language statement of human accountability.
- Read
CONSTITUTION.md. - Reference it from your own project, syllabus, lab handbook, or contribution guidelines — for example: "This project follows the Human–AI Collaboration Constitution ([link])."
- Adapt it if needed. The license permits modification with attribution; please indicate changes (see License). Substantive changes to the Articles should be rare and should preserve the Final Principle.
This repository includes a CITATION.cff file, so GitHub will show a "Cite this repository" button once published. A BibTeX entry:
@misc{SimpleHumanAIConstitution2026,
author = {Suri, Kunal},
title = {Human--AI Collaboration Constitution},
year = {2026},
version = {1.0},
howpublished = {GitHub repository},
url = {https://github.com/kunalsuri/human-ai-collaboration-constitution},
note = {Licensed under CC BY 4.0}
}This Constitution argues for transparency about AI use (Article 4), so it states its own plainly.
This document was prepared with the assistance of an AI system — Claude (Anthropic) — used for drafting, structuring, and locating relevant source material. Every article, claim, and citation was then reviewed, verified, and approved by the human author, who bears sole and final responsibility for the content in accordance with Articles 1 and 2. The AI is not an author and is not accountable for the work; the human is. In other words, the repository was produced the way it asks others to work.
All article and preamble text in CONSTITUTION.md is original to this work. The governance and historical instruments that inform it — the EU AI Act, the European Commission's Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI, the OECD AI Principles, Magna Carta, the Charter of the United Nations, and IBM's decision-maker guidance — are referenced by name and not reproduced; each is listed, with the connection it supports, in the document's Sources and Inspirations section. No third-party text is copied into this repository. Quotation, where it occurs, is minimal and attributed.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
You may share and adapt the material, including commercially, provided you give appropriate credit, link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. The short notice lives in LICENSE; the full legal code is the canonical text published by Creative Commons at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. (If you prefer GitHub to embed the full license text, you can also add it via Add file → Create new file → LICENSE → Choose a license template → "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0".)
Suggested attribution:
"Human–AI Collaboration Constitution" by Kunal Suri, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Source: https://github.com/kunalsuri/human-ai-collaboration-constitution
Suggestions and discussion are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md. Open an issue to propose a change; the seven Articles are intentionally stable, so edits to them are weighed carefully.