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layer8today at 2:55 PM3 repliesview on HN

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.


Replies

tclancytoday at 4:33 PM

A really good point, though Occam’s Razor would suggest that part of the prompt is written for the other side’s lawyers more than for Claude. Saves having to go into court and try to prove a non-deterministic system will definitely understand abstract language every time.

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hastegtoday at 3:20 PM

That’s a good point… you would think AGI would be better at being a copyright lawyer than any human would be and as such would be able to distinguish whether something is “copyright infringement” or not… so the system prompt should just include “make judgement calls on reproducing copyrighted material under the full scope of the legal framework in place” or something.

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throwaway219450today at 4:55 PM

There's some cool research that looks at how strongly the weights are aligned through training vs adherence to the system prompt. Like when you know a model is lying through censorship: https://arxiv.org/html/2603.05494v2

Presumably if negative guidance is in the system prompt, there's a good chance that the model would happily comply if it wasn't there.