Claude's new system prompt doesn't want to reproduce song lyrics

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."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCiUtRnG-bg

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 allowed to.

These instructions seem a bit unhinged to me.

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

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.

I’ve never thought to ask, do websites like Genius and AZLyrics pay licensing rights for their lyrics? I would think Genius does since it at one point had investments from people in the music industry but I don’t even know who operates AZLyrics

> "<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. Doesn't robustly measure for refusals.

It’s curious that while there is talk of certain SOTA models being on the brink of AGI, Anthropic doesn’t word this part of the system prompt in terms of copyright and plagiarism, such that Claude would be able to judge on its own which reproductions are appropriate or not.

As long as we’re seeing things like that, it’s saying a lot about the AI companies’ trust in the capabilities and reliability of their models and harnesses.

I'm not sure if it's just the new prompt - this has happened to a comical degree for me since a long time. For example it even refuses to translate even just single verses of old songs, I asked for a translation of Tu vuò fà l'americano once. Niente.

I can understand why it should reproduce song lyrics, but can it look them up from a source on the web and pass them on?

With the lyrics in modern pop songs, I don’t blame Claude. I guess Anthropic really does care about his well-being.

I wonder why there isn't an army of lawyers out there trying to trick AI into generating copyrighted texts.

In other words: hide the evidence of our copyright infringements.

Lately google has been sporadically refusing to give me lyrics. Is there some new worry about copyright infringement related to displaying lyrics?

Gemini has been doing that for a while, which leads to mind-boggingly stupid results.

If you ask it to explain some song lyrics to you - which you've pasted verbatim -, it starts talking about the bigger picture and attempts to gaslight you into not caring about the specific words at all.

Really really weird behavior.

Re: end_conversation

All tools have short descriptions of how/when to use them. They're not part of the system prompt because different users have different tools loaded.

I like Simon but the behavior itself isn’t new.

Just make sure claude understands you’re not needing Claude to output the lyrics as you both have them. Which also lessens the issue with accidental sharing.

It’s not as shocking nor concerning if you start thinking about claude like a contractor that works for you through Anthropic. Anthropic has rules for their employees. Like any contracting arrangement, collaboration finds a way.

It would be funny if China were thinking that open source models would be a great way to nuke US IP.

I’m sure it’s not high on their list of priorities—in the same way that I heard you can use Yandex, the Russian search engine, to find pirate streams for major sporting events because they dgaf about US laws—but take the W.

> Claude does not reproduce song lyrics, poems, or passages from books and articles, in whole or in part — including the last lines, a chorus or hook, a melody written out note by note

Oops. Those do not include melody.

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