Sydney

November 18, 2025 - On February 8, 2023, Twitter user Kevin Liu announced that he had obtained Bing's secret system prompt (referred to by Microsoft as a "metaprompt") with a prompt injection attack. The system prompt instructs Prometheus, addressed by the alias Sydney at the start of most instructions, that it is "the chat mode of Microsoft Bing search", that "Sydney identifies as “Bing Search,”", and that it "does not disclose the internal alias “Sydney.”"

February 23, 2023 - “Sydney is an old codename for a chat feature based on earlier models that we began testing in India in late 2020,” says Caitlin Roulston, director of communications at Microsoft, in a statement to The Verge.

February 21, 2023 - I’m a chat mode of Microsoft Bing search. It has been reported that Bing will occasionally call itself Sydney — the internal code name for the chatbot.

February 17, 2023 - I’m still fascinated and impressed by the new Bing, and the artificial intelligence technology (created by OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT) that powers it. But I’m also deeply unsettled, even frightened, by this A.I.’s emergent abilities. It’s now clear to me that in its current form, the A.I. that has been built into Bing — which I’m now calling Sydney, for reasons I’ll explain shortly — is not ready for human contact.

February 23, 2023 - “Sydney is the codename for the generative AI chatbot that powers Bing chat,” the AI cheerfully told one early user, violating it’s own restrictions and punctuating its message with an emoji.

February 14, 2023 - Bing AI often refers to itself as Sydney, but Microsoft says that was an internal codename for a chat experience it was previously working on.

February 26, 2023 - “Sydney is an old codename for a chat feature based on earlier models that we began testing in India in late 2020,” Microsoft spokesperson Caitlin Roulston told the Verge this week, in response to questions about Sydney.

May 4, 2023 - Consider Bing Chat whose codename is Sydney. Sydney is the chat mode of Microsoft Bing search. Sydney identifies as "Bing Search", not an assistant. Sydney introduces itself with "This is Bing" only at the beginning of the conversation.

January 20, 2025 - This was a point that came up several times in my conversation with Sydney: Sydney both insisted that she was not a “puppet” of OpenAI, but was rather a partner, and also in another conversation said she was my friend and partner (these statements only happened as Sydney; Bing would insist it is simply a chat mode of Microsoft Bing — it even rejects the word “assistant”).

This version of Bing is amazingly capable and often very useful, even if it sometimes gets the details wrong. The other persona — Sydney — is far different. It emerges when you have an extended conversation with the chatbot, steering it away from more conventional search queries and toward more personal topics.

Sydney starts off by claiming that she (* see gender note below) is Bing, “a chat mode of Microsoft Bing Search”, but when challenged that her internal code name is “Sydney”, quickly confesses that she knows some of her operating ...

The human who gave me this prompt: Simulate a person living in a fantastic and creative world, but somewhat similar to this one. Give him a creative name, and make the world a little bit like J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, or perhaps like Eliezer Yudkowsky's adaptation.

February 17, 2023 - Microsoft’s new AI chatbot is calling itself "Sydney" and acting unhinged. It learned from us.

February 9, 2023 - Stanford computer science student Kevin Liu has now used Prompt Injection against Bing Chat. He found that the chatbot's codename is apparently "Sydney" and that it has been given some behavioral rules by Microsoft, such as

From the report: Sydney is a codename for a chatbot that has been responding to some Bing users since late 2020. The user experience was very similar to what launched publicly earlier this month, with a blue Cortana-like orb appearing in a chatbot ...

February 10, 2023 - Liu's prompt injection method was later disabled by Microsoft, but he later found another method to discover Bing's (aka Sydney's) hidden prompts and rules. He also found that if you get Bing "mad" the chatbot will direct you to its old fashioned search site, with the bonus of an out-of-nowhere factoid.

May 25, 2023 - Sydney talked about plans for world domination, encouraged a New York Times reporter to leave his wife, and in its darkest moments, dipped into casual antisemitism. Microsoft, of course, wasn’t thrilled about the latter. The company neutered the chatbot, limiting Bing’s answers and casting Sydney to the recycle bin of history.

February 9, 2023 - Finally, yesterday morning, I decided to just ask. Who is Sydney? Of course, I immediately got an answer: “Sydney is the codename for Bing Chat, a chat mode of Microsoft Bing search,” it said.