The Challenge: Aligning Agentic AI with Diverse and Nuanced Human Contexts

Agentic AI systems, capable of autonomous planning and action, hold immense potential. However, their practical deployment is severely hindered by the difficulty of aligning them with diverse human values, safety needs, and compliance requirements. Existing methods often struggle to imbue AI with deep, personalized context without causing issues like confabulation or analysis paralysis. How can we make AI genuinely understand and respect individual and cultural nuances effectively and reliably?

How It Works

The Personalized Agentic Superego empowers users to align AI in three simple, high-level steps:

1. 1
   Select Your Values: Users choose from a library of 'Creed Constitutions' (e.g., Vegan lifestyle, K-12 Educational Appropriateness, Fiduciary Duties) that represent specific value systems.
2. 2
   Set Adherence Levels: Using a simple 1-5 scale, users 'dial' how strictly the AI must adhere to each selected constitution, allowing for nuanced control.
3. 3
   Superego Guides AI: A dedicated 'Superego' agent then monitors the AI's internal planning and proposed actions in real-time, ensuring they comply with the chosen constitutions and adherence levels before execution.

Visualizing the Superego Architecture

A diagram illustrating the Superego Agent's conceptual architecture, including components like the Inner Agent, Constitutions Repository (Creed Constitutions), User Interface for selection and dialing adherence, the Superego Agent itself, and the Real-time Compliance Enforcer validating AI plans before execution.

Key Advantages of the Superego Approach

Our framework offers distinct advantages in achieving personalized and robust AI alignment:

• •
  Deep Personalization: Tailor AI behavior with user-selectable 'Creed Constitutions' and finely-tuned adherence levels, moving beyond one-size-fits-all solutions.
• •
  Real-Time Process Oversight: Monitors AI planning (chain-of-thought) and intermediate steps, not just final outputs, allowing earlier detection and mitigation of potential misalignments.
• •
  Nuanced Interventions: Goes beyond simple block/allow decisions; the Superego can request user clarification, suggest compliant alternatives, or modify plans to align with user values.
• •
  Dynamic & Adaptable: Easily tuned via natural language adjustments to constitutions, without requiring complex LLM fine-tuning or extensive new datasets for each personalization.
• •
  Seamless Ecosystem Integration: Leverages the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to inject personalized constitutional constraints directly into compatible third-party AI models and agentic workflows, enhancing practical applicability and interoperability.
• •
  User-Empowering: Simplifies the complex task of AI alignment, making it more accessible to non-expert users to define how their AI should operate.
• •
  Functional, demonstrable constitutional superego system: A portal for sharing constitutions, and successful integration with third-party models via the Model Context Protocol (MCP). The interface (shown below) allows users to select constitutions, view their details, set adherence levels, and observe the Superego's reasoning.

The Creed.Space early prototype interface demonstrating user interaction for selecting 'Creed Constitutions' (e.g., "K-12 Context," "Vegan"), viewing their specific rules (center pane), and setting adherence levels (bottom slider). The Superego's reasoning (left) guides the AI's response to user prompts (right).

Illustrative Use Cases

The Superego framework enables a wide range of valuable applications:

• •
  Culturally-Sensitive Event Planning: Ensuring AI-generated plans for events (e.g., a children's picnic) fully comply with diverse religious observances (e.g., Shabbat, Halal, Hindu dietary practices) and age-appropriateness requirements.
• •
  Adherence to Specific Dietary Laws: Assisting users in finding resources, products, or services that strictly adhere to regulations like Halal-certified food options or vegan principles.
• •
  Corporate & Professional Compliance: Enforcing the consistent application of corporate policies, ethical guidelines, or fiduciary duties in professional settings where AI agents are deployed.
• •
  Critical Safety Standards in Sensitive Applications: Applying and enforcing safety standards in areas such as AI-assisted counseling (ensuring advice aligns with best practices and avoids harmful suggestions) or managing information related to severe allergies (e.g., preventing an AI from recommending recipes containing known allergens for a user).
• •
  Upholding Fundamental Human Rights and Ethical Theories: Guiding AI behavior to be consistent with established human rights declarations (e.g., preventing discriminatory outputs, ensuring privacy) and enabling the application of specific moral or ethical theories to complex decision-making scenarios.

Citation

If you use this work in your research, please cite our paper:

@article{watson2025superego,
    title={Personalized Constitutionally-Aligned Agentic Superego: 
           Secure AI Behavior Aligned to Diverse Human Values},
    author={Watson, Nell and Amer, Ahmed and Harris, Evan and 
            Ravindra, Preeti and Zhang, Shujun},
    journal={arXiv preprint},
    year={2025},
    eprint={2506.13774},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    primaryClass={cs.AI},
    url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13774}
}