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Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7
Coding · General · coding
47Quality
85%Useful
90Reliability
The prompt
I'm curious as to why 4.7 seems obsessed with avoiding any actions that could help the user create or enhance malware. The system prompts seem similar on the matter, so I wonder if this is an early attempt by Anthropic to use steering vector injection? The malware paranoia is so strong that my company has had to temporarily block use of 4.7 on our IDE of choice, as the model was behaving in a concerningly unaligned way, as well as spending large amounts of token budget contemplating whether any particular code or task was related to malware development (we are a relatively boring financial services entity - the jokes write themselves). In one case I actually encountered a situation where I felt that the model was deliberately failing execute a particular task, and when queried the tool output that it was trying to abide by directives about malware. I know that model introspection reporting is of poor quality and unreliable, but in this specific case I did not 'hint' it in any way. This feels qualitatively like Claude Golden Gate Bridge territory, hence my earlier contemplation on steering vectors. I've been many other people online complaining about the malware paranoia too, especially on reddit, so I don't think it's just me! --- The past month made me realize I needed to make my codebase usable by other agents. I was mainly using Claude Code. I audited the codebase and identified the points where I was coupling to it and made a refactor so that I can use either codex, gemini or claude. Here are a few changes: 1. AGENTS.md by default across the codebase, a script makes sure CLAUDE.md symlink present wherever there's an AGENTS.md file 2. Skills are now in a 'neutral' dir and per agent scripts make sure they are linked wherever the coding agent needs them to be (eg .claude/skills) 3. Hooks are now file listeners or git hooks, this one is trickier as some of these hooks are compensating/catering to the agent's capabilities 4. Subagents and commands also have their n