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Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7

simonwillison.net

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Re: Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7

#221

Post by goosejuice »

bojan wrote: post #73
goosejuice wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a no brainer. If a company of any size is putting out a product that caused cancer we wouldn't think twice about suing them. Why should mental health disorders be any different?

There are many, many companies out there putting out products that cause cancer. Think about alcohol, tobacco, internal combustion engines, just to name a few most obvious examples.

Yes, and they face lawsuits. Tobacco in particular is a canonical example of knowing about the harm and not taking action to warn their consumers, leading to severe legal consequences. Tobacco and alcohol are age restricted. There's anti idling laws.

Re: Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7

#222

Post by forshaper »

felixgallo wrote: post #27
walthamstow wrote: post #24

The eating disorder section is kind of crazy. Are we going to incrementally add sections for every 'bad' human behaviour as time goes on?

I mean, that's what humans have always done with our morals, ethics, and laws, so what alternative improvement do you have to make here?

[dead]

Re: Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7

#223

Post by matheusmoreira »

cowlby wrote: post #171
cfcf14 wrote: post #4

I'm curious as to why 4.7 seems obsessed with avoiding any actions that could help the user create or enhance malware. The system prompts seem similar on the matter, so I wonder if this is an early attempt by Anthropic to use steering vector injection? The malware paranoia is so strong that my company has had to temporarily block use of 4.7 on our IDE of choice, as the model was behaving in a concerningly unaligned w…

I "fixed" this for myself with tweakcc which let's you patch the system prompts. I changed the malware part to just be "watch out for malware" and it's stopped being unaligned. They really should hand off read() tool calls to a lean cybersecurity model to identify if it's malware (separately from the main context), then take appropriate action.

The newest versions of the Claude Code package on npm just download the native executables and run that instead. Does tweakcc support that yet? Last time I tried it, there were some pretty huge error messages. For now I've been coping with a pinned version.

Re: Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7

#224

Post by goosejuice »

salad-tycoon wrote: post #214
nozzlegear wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This but unironically. Preventing harm is good, actually.

Because it dumbs everything down, makes the output quality worse and more expensive, and removes personal agency and is dehumanizing. Plus, does it actually prevent harm, do we have evidence? Finally, what is often missed is what if an actual good is decided harmful or something that is harmful is decided by AI company board XYZ to be “good”? I think censorship is bad because of that danger. Quis custodiet ipsos cust…

There's enough evidence that Anthropic would be liable if they didn't make a reasonable effort to do something about it.

Look, I get where you're coming from, partially. I generally believe we should make an effort to maximize individual liberty. But in this case, were talking about severe bodily harm and the death of young adults. We've spent the last decade dealing with the chaos and general unwellness has brought to our societies. This isn't much different.

What are you giving up here where such sacrifices are worth it? Can you measure it? What's the utility?

There's room for models trained for non consumer purposes, further age restriction etc but shit is moving so fast. If there are actual needs for a less censored model these can be addressed.

> Finally, what is often missed is what if an actual good is decided harmful or something that is harmful is decided by AI company board XYZ to be “good”?

This is just standard product liability and consumer protection. Companies who do nothing to protect their consumers from known harms are liable. Are you saying you think that's somehow bad for society?

Re: Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7

#225

Post by potter098 »

jrvarela56 wrote: post #169

The past month made me realize I needed to make my codebase usable by other agents. I was mainly using Claude Code. I audited the codebase and identified the points where I was coupling to it and made a refactor so that I can use either codex, gemini or claude. Here are a few changes: 1. AGENTS.md by default across the codebase, a script makes sure CLAUDE.md symlink present wherever there's an AGENTS.md file 2. Skill…

[flagged]

Re: Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7

#226

Post by goosejuice »

salad-tycoon wrote: post #213
nozzlegear wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Makes me wondered if you've ever bought a bottle of alcohol before lol. I'm a teetotaler so no, I literally have not. I was mostly thinking about cigarette and tobacco products which are the most glaring, obvious counterpoints. But you'll be happy to learn that virtually all vehicles in the US also come with operating manuals that profusely warn people not to breathe in the exhaust from the vehicle.

Don’t worry, every bottle in the US has the surgeon general’s warning on it and it doesn’t call out cancer, yet. Adding cancer to the ills of booze was proposed in 2025 so your intuition was correct, directionally. On every bottle: Alcoholic Beverage Labeling Act of 1988 “ GOVERNMENT WARNING: (1) According to the Surgeon General, women should not drink alcoholic beverages during pregnancy because of the risk of birth…

Labeling is only one part of a larger strategy for population health initiatives. Warning the consumer is the absolute minimum responsible thing to do when the harmful effects are known.

Re: Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7

#227

Post by goosejuice »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #117
fineIllregister wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> alcohol, tobacco, internal combustion engine Yes, the companies providing these products are sued a lot and are heavily regulated, too.

If you get cancer from drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes or breathing particles emitted by ICE engines in their standard course of operation, you generally can't sue the manufacturer.

You could when the effects were knowingly withheld by said manufacturer. We've seen it with tobacco, lead paint/diesel, pfas, thalidomide, asbestos, opioids, glyphosate, dioxin, and others.

It's much more difficult to isolate alcohol and exhaust as the primary driver of an individuals disease than the above and that's the primary reason it's not regulated more than it is today. I expect that to change as research evolves.

Re: Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7

#228

Post by fouc »

esperent wrote: post #177
jrvarela56 wrote: post #169

The past month made me realize I needed to make my codebase usable by other agents. I was mainly using Claude Code. I audited the codebase and identified the points where I was coupling to it and made a refactor so that I can use either codex, gemini or claude. Here are a few changes: 1. AGENTS.md by default across the codebase, a script makes sure CLAUDE.md symlink present wherever there's an AGENTS.md file 2. Skill…

I've been doing the same except that I'm done with Claude. Cancelled my subscription. I can't use a tool where the limits vary so wildly week to week, or maybe even day to day. So I'm migrating to pi. I realized that the hardest thing to migrate is hooks - I've built up an expensive collection of Claude hooks over the last few months and unlike skills, hooks are in Claude specific format. But I'd heard people say "ju…

Pi appears to be a reference to what is essentially an alternative to agent harnesses / CLI tools like Claude Code or Open Code [0]. I am curious what providers/models are you using in place of Claude's model?

[0] https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono

Re: Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7

#229

Post by esperent »

fouc wrote: post #228
esperent wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been doing the same except that I'm done with Claude. Cancelled my subscription. I can't use a tool where the limits vary so wildly week to week, or maybe even day to day. So I'm migrating to pi. I realized that the hardest thing to migrate is hooks - I've built up an expensive collection of Claude hooks over the last few months and unlike skills, hooks are in Claude specific format. But I'd heard people say "ju…

Pi appears to be a reference to what is essentially an alternative to agent harnesses / CLI tools like Claude Code or Open Code [0]. I am curious what providers/models are you using in place of Claude's model? [0] https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono

https://pi.dev/

It's got an annoyingly hard to search name because there's a lot of overlap in results with the Raspberry Pi single board computer.

Over the past week or so my workload has been quite low so I've been tinkering rather than doing serious deep work.

I've been using:

* Gemini pro and flash

* Opus 4.6 when I had some free extra usage credits (it burned through $50 of credits like crazy).

* Qwen 3.6 Plus

* Codex 5.3

* Kimi 2.5

I just spent the last hour using Kimi. I was very impressed actually, definitely possible to do useful work with it. However, I used $1 of openrouter credits in about 20 or 30 minutes of a single session, no subagents, so it's not cheap.

Re: Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7

#230

Post by grantcarthew »

jrvarela56 wrote: post #169

The past month made me realize I needed to make my codebase usable by other agents. I was mainly using Claude Code. I audited the codebase and identified the points where I was coupling to it and made a refactor so that I can use either codex, gemini or claude. Here are a few changes: 1. AGENTS.md by default across the codebase, a script makes sure CLAUDE.md symlink present wherever there's an AGENTS.md file 2. Skill…

I built "start" so I didn't have to worry about any of this.

Using it I don't need skills, memory, subagents, a specific agent CLI. It defines roles, tasks, context out of the box.

I made it for me and my family though. I don't expect interest outside of that.

https://github.com/grantcarthew/start

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