Behavioral Specification | behavior.engineering

A behavioral specification is the document that answers: “What should this model do, and why?” It captures the intended behavior across scenarios — what the model should help with, where it should exercise caution, how it should handle ambiguity, what tone and persona it should maintain. Well-written specs are specific enough to give annotators, evaluators, and prompt writers shared direction, but principled enough that teams can reason through novel situations consistently. For behavior architects, the spec is a core artifact: it’s the bridge between stakeholder goals and the concrete training, prompting, and evaluation decisions that determine what the model actually does. A product without a behavioral spec is working from implicit assumptions no one has examined.

Model Behavior SpecificationA structured template for defining what an AI system should and should not do — the foundational artifact of model behavior architecture.
Behavior DesignThe practice of intentionally defining and shaping how an AI model acts across a range of situations, rather than leaving behavior to emerge by default.
Content PolicyA documented set of rules governing what types of content a model will and will not produce.
Model BehaviorThe observable outputs, responses, and actions of an AI model as experienced by users and systems interacting with it.
Value AlignmentThe degree to which a model's behavior reflects human values, intentions, and goals rather than optimizing for narrow objectives that miss the point.
Policy WritingThe craft of authoring clear, principled documents that define what a model will and won't do, and why — serving as guidance for training, evaluation, and deployment decisions.
The RoleWhat is a model behavior architect? An overview of the discipline sitting at the intersection of AI product design, prompt engineering, evaluation, safety, UX, and policy.