The GCC manual says that:

"The aligned attribute can only increase the alignment; but you can decrease it by specifying packed as well. See below."

However, GCC accepts the attribute in typedef definitions that decrease the alignment of the defined type.  The program below fails with all versions of GCC I've tried, all the way back to 4.5.

Either the documentation should be adjusted to reflect this feature or the implementation should be changed to reject (or ignore with a warning) definitions of types that would reduce a type's alignment requirement.

As a data point, the current versions of C and C++ disallow alignment specification on typedefs.  As another data point, of the three GCC-compatible compilers I tested, Sun cc successfully compiles the code below (with warnings), while Clang and Intel CC fail in the same assertions as GCC.

$ cat u.c && /home/msebor/build/gcc-trunk-git/gcc/xgcc -B/home/msebor/build/gcc-trunk-git/gcc -S -Wall -Wextra -Wpedantic -o/dev/null -std=c11 u.c

#define Align(N)    __attribute__ ((aligned (N)))
#define Assert(e)   typedef int A [1 - 2 * !(e)]

void f (void)
{
  typedef int I32 Align (32);
  Assert (__alignof__ (I32) == 32);

  typedef I32 Align (1) I1;
  Assert (__alignof__ (I1) == __alignof__ (I32));

  typedef int Align (2) I2;
  Assert (__alignof__ (I2) == __alignof__ (int));
}
u.c: In function ‘f’:
u.c:2:33: error: size of array ‘A’ is negative
 #define Assert(e)   typedef int A [1 - 2 * !(e)]
                                 ^

u.c:10:3: note: in expansion of macro ‘Assert’
   Assert (__alignof__ (I1) == __alignof__ (I32));
   ^~~~~~

u.c:2:33: error: size of array ‘A’ is negative
 #define Assert(e)   typedef int A [1 - 2 * !(e)]
                                 ^

u.c:13:3: note: in expansion of macro ‘Assert’
   Assert (__alignof__ (I2) == __alignof__ (int));
   ^~~~~~