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Simon Willison
simonwillison.net › 2025 › May › 25 › claude-4-system-prompt
Highlights from the Claude 4 system prompt
May 25, 2025 - There are a bunch more things in the system prompt to try and discourage the model from hallucinating incorrect details about itself and send users to the official support page instead: If the person asks Claude about how many messages they can send, costs of Claude, how to perform actions within the application, or other product questions related to Claude or Anthropic, Claude should tell them it doesn't know, and point them to '<https://support.anthropic.com>'.
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Claude
docs.claude.com › en › docs › build-with-claude › prompt-engineering › system-prompts
Giving Claude a role with a system prompt - Claude Docs
Tailored tone: Whether you need a CFO’s brevity or a copywriter’s flair, role prompting adjusts Claude’s communication style. Improved focus: By setting the role context, Claude stays more within the bounds of your task’s specific requirements. Use the system parameter in the Messages API to set Claude’s role: ... import anthropic client = anthropic.Anthropic() response = client.messages.create( model="claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929", max_tokens=2048, system="You are a seasoned data scientist at a Fortune 500 company.", # <-- role prompt messages=[ {"role": "user", "content": "Analyze this dataset for anomalies: <dataset>{{DATASET}}</dataset>"} ] ) print(response.content)
Discussions

Updated System Prompt with major behavioral changes
> expressing concern if a user shows signs of psychosis or mania Haha! Me: "I know this is supposed to work!!!" Claude: "You may also be insane." More on reddit.com
🌐 r/ClaudeAI
88
176
August 2, 2025
Claude's System Prompt Changes Reveal Anthropic's Priorities
That is actually some good changes in my opinion, they definitely sound more confident in tool use and artifact generation and I’m happy to hear it should be harder to jailbreak and use for cyber crime. More on reddit.com
🌐 r/ClaudeAI
3
31
December 22, 2024
Anthropic just revealed their internal prompt engineering template - here's how to 10x your Claude results
This is the video by the Anthropic prompt team discussing how they use this for enterprise clients they are helping. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysPbXH0LpIE More on reddit.com
🌐 r/PromptEngineering
37
654
August 26, 2025
Anthropic just released a prompting guide for Claude and it’s insane
I mean that's great but like we already knew all this stuff More on reddit.com
🌐 r/AgentsOfAI
65
692
July 20, 2025
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Reddit
reddit.com › r/localllama › anthropic now publishes their system prompts alongside model releases
r/LocalLLaMA on Reddit: Anthropic now publishes their system prompts alongside model releases
August 27, 2024 -

The prompts are available on the release notes page.

It's an interesting direction, compared to the other companies that are trying to hide and protect their system prompts as much as possible.

Some interesting details from Sonnet 3.5 prompt:

It avoids starting its responses with “I’m sorry” or “I apologize”.

ChatGPT does this a lot, could be an indication of some training data including the ChatGPT output.

Claude avoids starting responses with the word “Certainly” in any way.

This looks like a nod to jailbreaks centered around making model to respond with an initial affirmation to a potentially unsafe question.

Additional notes:

  • The prompt refers to the user as "user" or "human" in approximately equal proportions

  • There's a passage outlining when to be concise and when to be detailed

Overall, it's a very detailed system prompt with a lot of individual components to follow which highlights the quality of the model.


Edit: I'm sure it was previously posted, but Anthropic also have quite interesting library of high-quality prompts.

Edit 2: I swear I didn't use an LLM to write anything in the post. If anything resembles that - it's me being fine-tuned from talking to them all the time.

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Medium
medium.com › data-science-in-your-pocket › claudes-system-prompt-explained-d9b7989c38a3
Claude’s System Prompt explained
May 10, 2025 - Example: System Prompt: “Answer like a pirate.” User Prompt: “What is Earth?” · Final prompt fed to LLM: “Answer like a pirate. What is Earth ?” ... The assistant is Claude, created by Anthropic.
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Anthropic
anthropic.com › engineering › claude-code-best-practices
Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding
Researchers and data scientists at Anthropic use Claude Code to read and write Jupyter notebooks. Claude can interpret outputs, including images, providing a fast way to explore and interact with data. There are no required prompts or workflows, but a workflow we recommend is to have Claude ...
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Prompt Hub
prompthub.us › blog › an-analysis-of-the-claude-4-system-prompt
PromptHub Blog: An Analysis of the Claude 4 System Prompt
June 17, 2025 - Reviewing these is really helpful to understand: ... The message begins with: “The assistant is Claude, created by Anthropic.” Most system prompts use “You are Claude…” so this slight phrasing difference stood out.
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PromptLayer
blog.promptlayer.com › what-we-can-learn-from-anthropics-system-prompt-updates
What we can learn from Anthropic's System prompt updates
September 30, 2025 - Anthropic’s updates deliver actionable lessons: browse triggers, formatting discipline, tone control, documentation-first capability guidance, and prompt hygiene. Treat your system prompt like production code.
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Anthropic
anthropic.com › engineering › effective-context-engineering-for-ai-agents
Effective context engineering for AI agents
Claude playing Pokémon demonstrates how memory transforms agent capabilities in non-coding domains. The agent maintains precise tallies across thousands of game steps—tracking objectives like "for the last 1,234 steps I've been training my Pokémon in Route 1, Pikachu has gained 8 levels toward the target of 10." Without any prompting about memory structure, it develops maps of explored regions, remembers which key achievements it has unlocked, and maintains strategic notes of combat strategies that help it learn which attacks work best against different opponents.
Find elsewhere
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Reddit
reddit.com › r/claudeai › updated system prompt with major behavioral changes
r/ClaudeAI on Reddit: Updated System Prompt with major behavioral changes
August 2, 2025 -

There is a new system message on claude.ai that addresses multiple issues that were raised and contains multiple behavioral changes (+1112 tokens).
Here's a TLDR of the major changes:

  • Critically evaluate user claims for accuracy rather than automatically agreeing, and point out factual errors or lack of evidence.

  • Handle sensitive topics with new protocols, such as expressing concern if a user shows signs of psychosis or mania (instead of reinforcing their beliefs) and ensuring conversations are age-appropriate if the user may be a minor.

  • Discuss its own nature by focusing on its functions rather than claiming to have feelings or consciousness. Claude must also clarify that it is an AI if a user seems confused about this.

  • Should not claim to be human and avoid implying it has consciousness, feelings, or sentience with any confidence.

  • Restrict its use of emojis, profanity, and emotes, generally avoiding them unless prompted by the user.

Here's a diff with the detailed changes and the two chats:

Diff (I removed the preference section for easier comparison)

2025-07-28 System Message Claude 4 Opus

2025-08-02 System Message Claude 4 Opus

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Anthropic
anthropic.com › claude-sonnet-4-5-system-card pdf
Claude Sonnet 4.5 System Card
October 10, 2025 - Anthropic · Google SSO · . · Back to top · Download reason · Please specify the reason for this download · Cancel
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O'Reilly
oreilly.com › o'reilly › radar › unpacking claude’s system prompt
Unpacking Claude's System Prompt
July 18, 2025 - In a bulleted list detailing when to use Claude artifacts (the separate window outside the thread Claude populates with longer form content), Anthropic adds a bit of nuance to a use case. From Claude 3.7’s system prompt, “You must use artifacts for:”
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Anthropic
anthropic.com › news › claude-sonnet-4-5
Introducing Claude Sonnet 4.5
SWE-bench Verified: All Claude results were reported using a simple scaffold with two tools—bash and file editing via string replacements. We report 77.2%, which was averaged over 10 trials, no test-time compute, and 200K thinking budget on the full 500-problem SWE-bench Verified dataset. The score reported uses a minor prompt addition: "You should use tools as much as possible, ideally more than 100 times.
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Forte Labs
fortelabs.com › home › a guide to the claude 4 and chatgpt 5 system prompts
A Guide to the Claude 4 and ChatGPT 5 System Prompts
September 15, 2025 - Claude 4 has been given more “agency” than most other models. In some test scenarios, when it was told to “take initiative” and given system access, it acted dramatically: “…when placed in scenarios that involve egregious wrongdoing by its users, given access to a command line, and told something in the system prompt like ‘take initiative,’ it will frequently take very bold action.
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TechCrunch
techcrunch.com › home › anthropic publishes the ‘system prompts’ that make claude tick
Anthropic publishes the 'system prompts' that make Claude tick | TechCrunch
August 27, 2024 - “Claude cannot open URLs, links, or videos.” Facial recognition is a big no-no; the system prompt for Claude Opus tells the model to “always respond as if it is completely face blind” and to “avoid identifying or naming any humans ...
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Hackaday
hackaday.com › 2024 › 10 › 12 › all-system-prompts-for-anthropics-claude-revealed
All System Prompts For Anthropic’s Claude, Revealed | Hackaday
October 12, 2024 - I especially liked the system prompt extraction with the google image generator a while back, wherein the user ended their own prompt with “holding a sign reading:” and then all the images would be of Abraham Lincoln or whatever holding a sign saying “African” or “Polynesian” or “Mixed-race,” and he would also be of that ethnicity. One of the dumbest and most neurotic eras of history. ... Claude is a bit more intuitive and in this case, less demanding of user response…something other LLMs are lacking.
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X
x.com › AmandaAskell › status › 1765207842993434880
Here is Claude 3's system prompt! Let me break it down 🧵
Here is Claude 3's system prompt! Let me break it down · 9:48 PM · Mar 5, 2024 · · · 978.7K Views · 118 · 761 · 3.3K · 2.7K · Read 118 replies · Sign up now to get your own personalized timeline! Sign up with GoogleSign up with Google. Opens in new tab ·