Simon Willison

Quoting Claude Opus 5 system prompt

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Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 were first released on June 9, 2026. On June 12, 2026, Anthropic suspended access to both models to comply with U.

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Simon Willison
Sep 2

llm-anthropic 0.28

The release of llm-anthropic 0.28 introduces support for Claude Fable 5.1, enabling default display of reasoning traces for compatible models. It also adds a new llm_anthropic.ClaudeRefusal exception to handle cases where Claude returns a refusal. These updates enhance debugging and error handling for users of the library.

Simon Willison
Sep 2

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

Anthropic has released the system prompts for its Claude consumer applications, including historic changes and an index structure that allows easy diffing of prompts. The latest update, seen in Fable 5.1, adds a comprehensive rule that Claude will not reproduce song lyrics, poems, or copyrighted passages, and will refuse any reworded requests thereafter, offering analysis instead. The prompts are accessible in Markdown via the platform.claude.com/docs site, facilitating transparent tracking of policy changes.

Simon Willison
Sep 16

Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude

Claude Cowork and the standard chat interface are merging into a single Claude experience, allowing users to hand over tasks or ask quick questions that the system will continue to handle even after the laptop is closed. The rollout will begin with Pro and Max plan users across web, desktop, and mobile, and will extend to new users on these plans over the coming weeks. This integration suggests Claude is evolving into a general agent, simplifying the distinction between Cowork and regular Claude usage.

Simon Willison
Sep 14

The contagion of fear

The article discusses Bryan Cantrill’s response to a tweet by former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon, who claimed that AI could kill humanity by the end of the decade. Cantrill shares a personal anecdote about how his own youthful mistakes caused undue panic among non‑technical peers and warns against repeating that pattern. He emphasizes that domain experts must be cautious when making alarmist claims, especially about complex topics like critical infrastructure, bioweapons, and extinction, and that the burden of accurate information lies with those making such statements.

Simon Willison
Sep 1

Claude Fable 5.1 made me a really nice animated pelican

The article discusses Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.1 release, highlighting its claimed improvements in coding, knowledge work, and problem‑solving, particularly a 52.6% score on the new Terminal‑Bench‑Science 0.1 benchmark. The author examines the model’s performance on the pelican benchmark, noting that Fable 5.1’s five reasoning levels (low, medium, high, xhigh, max) sometimes skip reasoning entirely for certain prompts, as evidenced by token counts and cost metrics. The piece provides detailed transcript data for each reasoning level when generating an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle.