Simon Willison dug into Anthropic’s newly reorganized public system-prompt pages and found a much stricter ban on reproducing song lyrics, poems, and long passages — including choruses, last lines, melodies written note-by-note, or lines a user pastes one at a time and claims as original. The same section extends to visual and designed works: specific album art, logos, posters, and product designs are off-limits even when drawn in code.
Willison notes the timing sits days after news that Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell sued Anthropic over alleged training on lyric databases. Whether or not the prompt change is a direct legal response, product users will feel it immediately: ask Claude to finish a famous hook and you should get a refusal, not a sing-along.
It is a practical compliance layer showing up in the model’s “constitution” text, not only in a courtroom filing.
Source: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/2/claudes-new-system-prompt/
