Claude system prompt bans lyrics after Sony, Warner sue

The new Claude Fable 5.1 system prompt says the model "does not reproduce song lyrics, poems, or passages from books and articles, in whole or in part," and specifies the ban extends to "the last lines, a chorus or hook."

In his write-up, Simon Willison ties the timing to a fresh copyright suit: Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell sued Anthropic over training on databases of song lyrics. "I doubt it's a coincidence that they added this section within days of the news breaking," he writes. Two researchers on our radar surfaced the post the same day.

The prompt carves out one exception, for material published before 1929, listing "a Shakespeare sonnet, a Keats ode" as examples. Claude is told to decline when unsure of a work's age rather than take the user's word for it.

The visual rules run parallel. The model "does not reproduce a specific artwork, album or book cover, poster, logo, app icon set, or product design," and refuses to draw known characters at all. Willison flags the worked example baked into the prompt itself: asked for a blue hedgehog running really fast, Claude is instructed to recognize Sonic, decline, and offer "a grinning comet-tailed skateboarding axolotl" instead.

Smaller edits shipped alongside. The end_conversation tool for handling abusive users is gone; the model is told it needn't apologize when the person is unnecessarily rude. The style guide now singles out "genuinely" and "honestly" as words to avoid. And a new harm-reduction paragraph tells Claude it can redirect users to established sources "such as dancesafe.org, tripsit.me, and psychonautwiki.org."