Claude's new system prompt refuses to reproduce song lyrics, days after labels sued Anthropic

Claude's new system prompt doesn't want to reproduce song lyrics

Anthropic updated Claude's consumer system prompts with a hefty new section forbidding reproduction of song lyrics, poems, or book passages—even when users claim the lines are their own. Simon Willison notes the timing lines up with Sony Music and Warner Chappell suing Anthropic. The prompt also bans drawing copyrighted characters and logos, complete with an example that declines Sonic and offers a skateboarding axolotl instead. Response style now pushes for shorter answers, and the knowledge cutoff is uniformly set to June 2026. Anthropic's docs site supports appending .md for raw Markdown, making prompt diffs trivial.

Why it matters: Simon Willison surfaced a quiet system prompt change at Anthropic—banning lyric/poetry reproduction—days after Sony/Warner sued. Concrete timeline, adversarial example, direct impact on Claude power users. Downgraded because it's a single-source observation, not an official an...