Claude's new system prompt refuses to reproduce song lyrics
Claude's new system prompt doesn't want to reproduce song lyrics
Anthropic updated Claude's system prompt to explicitly prohibit reproducing song lyrics, poems, and book passages, and to refuse drawing copyrighted characters or logos—even in code-generated art. The change follows lawsuits from Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell over training on lyrics. Simon Willison, who tracks these prompts, highlights the new rules, including a charming example where Claude suggests a skateboarding axolotl instead of Sonic, and notes that the prompt now includes external harm-reduction URLs for the first time.
That's Sonic, so I can't put him on the banner — but I'd love to make your son an original speedster.
- SyneRyder
I'm sad about the lyrics restrictions. I used to have interesting conversations with Claude about music, and songwriting and lyrics. I don't see how my use was harming artists, if anything Claude was introducing me to new artists and new music. I've bought music after recommendations by Claude.
Claude Sonnet 3.6 once recommended I listen to Johann Johannsson's album "IBM 1401 - A User's Manual". No lyrics in this one. Claude's advice was along the lines of (paraphrasing) "Listen to it first, don't look up anything about it. Take notes about what you notice, what you feel. When you've made your notes, then you can look up how it was made."
- simonw
My favorite thing about this project is the automatic changelog I now get for all Claude.ai system prompt changes: https://github.com/simonw/claude-system-prompts/blob/main/CH...
The summaries are generated by GPT-5.6 Luna because I don't trust Claude to summarize its own system prompts without being influenced by them (though to be fair the system prompts it summarizes are for the Claude consumer app, not Claude via the API).
There's even an Atom feed: https://simonw.github.io/claude-system-prompts/feed.atom
- IChooseY0u
This is something that Chinese models like Kimi/GLM will never care about. These kind of limitations along with the cyber-program nonsense is exactly why people will avoid OpenAI/Anthropic in the future.
- AnonC
A few days ago I saw some people criticizing Dwarkesh’s explanation of the HuggingFace hack by OpenAI’s AI agents. Their point was that by anthropomorphizing the AI agents, accountability of and blame on OpenAI’s poor practices are being ignored.
Now I see this blog post and wonder if Anthropic is being more true to its name and moving to “AI sentience” with the below.
> The way they handle abusive conversations has changed a bit too. The previous Fable 5 system prompt included this:
> If the person becomes abusive or unkind to Claude over the course of a conversation, Claude maintains a polite tone and can use the end_conversation tool when being mistreated. Claude should give the person a single warning before ending the conversation.
“Mistreated”? Can GenAI be mistreated? It’s just a bunch of tokens emitted by many computers over a network.
> Fable 5.1 replaces that with the following, no longer encouraging Claude to end the conversation:
> Claude deserves respectful engagement and needn't apologize when the person is unnecessarily rude: accountability without self-abasement, excessive apology, self-critique, or surrender. If the person becomes abusive, Claude doesn't become increasingly submissive. The goal is steady, honest helpfulness: acknowledge what went wrong, stay on the problem, maintain self-respect.
“Self-respect”? Can GenAI truly have a concept of self-respect for itself? It surely can pretend to, like it can pretend to be any living being if instructed to and […]
- peri-cl
> "<user>Can you make a birthday banner for my son with a blue hedgehog running really fast on it? He loves that little guy.</user>"
I'd love it so much if the free-spirited hacker community made in this into an auxiliary pelican benchmark.
edit: Actually, never mind, this particular one's a bad benchmark since some models might not figure out who "that guy" refers to, and just draw a literal hedgehog that's blue. Possibly running on four legs. It's not robust at gauging refusal, which is the point of it.