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."
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).
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.
Qwen 3.8 27B being so good, so easy to run on premise on cheap hardware and having so little limitations compared to what the US decides can or cannot be done is really eye opening.
The main tradeoff I’ve found with running models like Qwen 3.8 locally is speed. On my hardware, they’re significantly slower than models served through OpenRouter, ChatGPT, or Claude.
That’s been fine for smaller tasks like analyzing a document, but for more involved work like refactoring code the latency makes it harder to iterate.
Yeah for live it's a bit on the slower side though still usable on the 4070 ti and 5080 our usual office desk has here, but I found it awesome running on background tasks rather than on demand, things like analyze this and that with this and that ruleset and applicable law warn me with source and justification for any error or missing part etc, qualify each returns with a ranking (certain with source, probable with reason, suggestion),... With its thinking mode enabled and it's great context size abilities it's really powerful, and each employee basically has their own assistant working in the background checking their files on its own as the day progresses
(the main reason is not just cost, it's data not going out and even mess leaving the EU, this essentially frees us of a lot of hurdles)
We would be doing it now if it wasn't cutting into frontier companies' revenue.
Eg if you use Claude, you probably want fable architecting, a couple of opus under it managing sub project and sonnet doing the actual function code, because fable coding a "run a query and filter the result" is a massive waste of abilities. But their own sub agent downgrade is limited to one level so if you use fable it will never direct sonnet coders.
> "<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.
claude.ai free tier refused: "I'd love to make this, but I can't recreate Sonic the Hedgehog specifically since he's a copyrighted character — I don't want to reproduce someone else's IP. What I can do is design an original speedy blue hedgehog mascot with the same energetic, "zoom!" spirit for your son's banner. Let me build that now." Result: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/33440ed4-536c-4692-965a-3...
Looks like Claude quietly downgraded your model (well, it's not really that quiet). That result's at a quality level similar to what local A3b Qwen drew for me, with a "make it SVG" addendum,
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.
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.
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.
The thing is, it currently doesn't matter if AGI objectively concludes that a particular thing is or isn't copyright infringement, because the human arbiter who holds the last word might still disagree.
The whole architecture of current LLMs just is not conductive to AGI, it's just marketing hype. In my opinion current LLMs aren't even AI, they're just fancy machine learning algorithms
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.
> 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
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.
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
Great album and backstory. You can't really go wrong with anything he composed. Rest in peace Johann.
> I don't see how my use was harming artists
Claude was reproducing their work without payment?
"if anything Claude was introducing me to new artists and new music"
Next time the RIAA goes after someone for downloading an MP3, tell the defendant to use that line.
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.
Qwen 3.8 27B being so good, so easy to run on premise on cheap hardware and having so little limitations compared to what the US decides can or cannot be done is really eye opening.
The main tradeoff I’ve found with running models like Qwen 3.8 locally is speed. On my hardware, they’re significantly slower than models served through OpenRouter, ChatGPT, or Claude.
That’s been fine for smaller tasks like analyzing a document, but for more involved work like refactoring code the latency makes it harder to iterate.
Yeah for live it's a bit on the slower side though still usable on the 4070 ti and 5080 our usual office desk has here, but I found it awesome running on background tasks rather than on demand, things like analyze this and that with this and that ruleset and applicable law warn me with source and justification for any error or missing part etc, qualify each returns with a ranking (certain with source, probable with reason, suggestion),... With its thinking mode enabled and it's great context size abilities it's really powerful, and each employee basically has their own assistant working in the background checking their files on its own as the day progresses
(the main reason is not just cost, it's data not going out and even mess leaving the EU, this essentially frees us of a lot of hurdles)
Maybe the Betamax/VHS is the best analogy for frontier vs. open models.
Better tech doesn't matter if it is non-tenable for the general public. Eventually, the higher volume product will win.
In the future we'll all use multiple models.
We would be doing it now if it wasn't cutting into frontier companies' revenue.
Eg if you use Claude, you probably want fable architecting, a couple of opus under it managing sub project and sonnet doing the actual function code, because fable coding a "run a query and filter the result" is a massive waste of abilities. But their own sub agent downgrade is limited to one level so if you use fable it will never direct sonnet coders.
... along with, perhaps, model castration à la pre-embargo Fable.-
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?
> "<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.
ChatGPT was happy to infringe: https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6a9c30da3bcc8191bb5203f1cb22f16a
As was Gemini: https://share.gemini.google/Q3EIX5wk64zC
Grok, too: https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5LWNvcHk_aaf1d61a-c995-42ca-90...
claude.ai free tier refused: "I'd love to make this, but I can't recreate Sonic the Hedgehog specifically since he's a copyrighted character — I don't want to reproduce someone else's IP. What I can do is design an original speedy blue hedgehog mascot with the same energetic, "zoom!" spirit for your son's banner. Let me build that now." Result: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/33440ed4-536c-4692-965a-3...
Looks like Claude quietly downgraded your model (well, it's not really that quiet). That result's at a quality level similar to what local A3b Qwen drew for me, with a "make it SVG" addendum,
https://i.ibb.co/ycgGD4b1/soonic.webp ( Qwen3.6-27B-A3b, a very small model )
I really want to see Claude's store-brand speedy blue hedgehog. Edit: Haha, thanks.
Claude's is a ... deformed, vectorized, geometric ... blob? :/
I love that little guy! lol
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.
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.
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.
The thing is, it currently doesn't matter if AGI objectively concludes that a particular thing is or isn't copyright infringement, because the human arbiter who holds the last word might still disagree.
The whole architecture of current LLMs just is not conductive to AGI, it's just marketing hype. In my opinion current LLMs aren't even AI, they're just fancy machine learning algorithms
Do you want AGI?
I don't. I want the tools we've got now, but progressively more effective and more useful.
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 really wish Anthropic would publish those tool descriptions.
I learned a ton of useful things about ChatGPT Work by having it dump out its tool descriptions the other day: https://codex-tool-reference.simonw.chatgpt.site/
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.
With the lyrics in modern pop songs, I don’t blame Claude. I guess Anthropic really does care about his well-being.
Lately google has been sporadically refusing to give me lyrics. Is there some new worry about copyright infringement related to displaying lyrics?
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.
> 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.
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.