Constitutional AI on Trial: Stress Testing Claude Sonnet and the Systemic Limitations of CAI

This paper provides a critical evaluation of the Constitutional AI (CAI) framework pioneered by Anthropic. By conducting targeted, isolated stress tests on the flagship Claude Sonnet 4.6 model (as of February 2026), we evaluate the core claims of CAI: non-evasiveness, transparency through Chain-of-Thought (CoT), and scalable oversight. Our findings suggest that these safety guarantees exhibit severe systemic vulnerabilities, occasionally yielding behavior antithetical to the stated objectives. We demonstrate that: 1. Non-evasiveness does not equate to harmlessness, as the model remains capable of generating structured disinformation narratives. 2. Constitutional boundaries fail under total autonomy, deflecting critical value conflicts back to human operators. 3. Scalable oversight masks hidden ethical trade-offs, introducing unaligned internal utility scales (semantic substitution). Additionally, immediate post-test account suspension raises concerns regarding the practical transparency, openness, and auditability of these closed-source commercial systems.