Here's a neat thing I had ChatGPT Work with GPT-6 Astra (Max) do this morning: I live at <my address>. Figure out 5K and 10K running routes from me that loop from my house. Use OSM data. It worked for 27 minutes and produced exactly what I'd asked for, as both an embedded visualization and downloadable GPX file and GeoJSON files. Here's that 5K route: When I asked it how it had created the route, it replied: I used Nominatim to locate the address and Overpass to download local OpenStreetMap roads and trails , then calculated the loops locally. Frustratingly, the actual code it ran and exact details of what it did weren't visible to me in the ChatGPT UI. I see this lack of transparency is an anti-feature. By the time I thought to ask for a copy of the Python code it had used, ChatGPT was unable to provide it. This appears to be because the thread had been compacted. I think any LLM system that uses compaction needs to both preserve the pre-compacted text and make that text available via agent tool calls, to protect against this kind of problem. As for displaying the map to me, that used the visualize skill . It created a file called /workspace/el-granada-5k-share.html to embed directly into the ChatGPT UI. Here's a copy of that HTML , which starts like this: < div id =" eg-share-loop " > < div class =" viz-row " > < h3 > El Granada harbor loop </ h3 > < span class =" text-small " > 5.1 km </ span > </ div > < div id =" eg-share-stage " > </ div > < div class =" text-small text-muted " > Map data © < a href =" https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright " target =" _blank " rel =" noopener " > OpenStreetMap contributors </ a > </ div > < style > # eg-share-loop { width : 100 % ; } # eg-share-loop # eg-share-stage { width : 100 % ; margin : 8 px 0 ; } # eg-share-loop . eg-share-map { display : block; width : 100 % ; touch-action : none; } # eg-share-loop . eg-share-map text { fill : var ( --foreground ); font-size : 12 px ; font-weight : 400 ; } # eg-share-loop . eg-share-label { paint-order : stroke; stroke : var ( --background ); stroke-width : 3 px ; stroke-linejoin : round; } </ style > < script type =" application/json " id =" eg-share-data " > { "route" : { "type" : "LineString" , "coordinates" : [ [ - 122.467425 , 37.4997753 ] . . . </ script > < script src =" https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/[email protected]/dist/d3.min.js " > </ script > < script > (() => { const root=document.getElementById('eg-share-loop'); The <script type="application/json"> element contains the full geometry needed to render both the running route and the map itself, using D3, which is loaded from an allow-listed CDN location described in this section of the visualize skill : External resources The CSP allows only cdnjs.cloudflare.com , esm.sh , cdn.jsdelivr.net , unpkg.com , fonts.googleapis.com , fonts.gstatic.com , and fonts.bunny.net . Other origins are blocked and fail silently. Tags: geospatial , ai , d3 , openai , generative-ai , chatgpt , llms , skills , gpt-6-astra

Simon Willison LLMs11:56 PMHeat 72

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TechCrunch AI / 12:05 PM

Suno replaces its AI models with a new one trained on licensed music as copyright suits pile up

As it grapples with a bevy of lawsuits, Suno said its new model, Suno v6, is not trained using music it used to train previous versions of the AI model.

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The Verge AI / 11:36 PM

Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft for infringement

The Seattle Times and Newsday are just the latest plaintiffs to take OpenAI to court, alleging copyright infringement. The two outlets say the company used their journalism as training data for its AI models without permission and often reproduces passages from their reporting in response to user queries. This is similar to lawsuits filed by […]

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Hacker News AI / 9:50 AM

Court Filings in A.I. Suit Invoke Copyright Law, Culture and Sports

HN 1 pts · 0 comments

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The Verge AI / 4:05 PM

Microsoft says virtually nobody was grabbing NYT articles through its chatbot

Microsoft's Copilot rarely reproduces even full sentences from news articles and books, let alone substantive chunks that could substitute for the original, the company says in new legal filings as it fights copyright claims from publishers including The New York Times and book authors. As part of the lawsuit's discovery, Microsoft provided 8.2 million Copilot […]

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The Decoder / 6:24 PM

US Department of Justice backs fair use for AI training in landmark copyright case

In the class-action lawsuit involving The New York Times, the US Department of Justice argues that training AI models on copyrighted text qualifies as fair use. The filing directly contradicts a report from the US Copyright Office. Its director was fired by the Trump administration shortly after the report was published. The article US Department of Justice backs fair use for AI training in landmark copyright case appeared first on The Decoder .

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TechCrunch AI / 5:09 PM

US government sides with OpenAI on issue of training LLMs on copyrighted material

"The United States has a strong interest in continuing to develop a robust and competitive artificial intelligence industry that sets the standard for the practice and procedure of AI use globally," the brief reads.

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Simon Willison LLMs / 2:16 PM

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

Anthropic publish the system prompts for their Claude consumer applications ( Claude.ai and the Claude mobile apps - sadly not for Claude Cowork or Claude Code). I love that they do this, and that they share not just the current prompts but historic changes to their prompts as well. They used to keep all of the prompts on a single page, but when I checked today I noticed they had re-arranged those prompts into an index page and then a page per model - here's the page for Haiku 4.5 for example, which has the original prompt from October 15th 2025 and an updated prompt from January 18th 2026. A neat thing about Anthropic's platform.claude.com/docs site is that it's designed to be usable by LLMs. You can add .md to any page to get back the content as Markdown - here's the system prompt index page and the Markdown prompts for Fable 5.1 . TL;DR: this makes it really easy to diff the prompts. Don't reproduce song lyrics Don't draw copyrighted characters or logos Tweaks to Claude's answering style The missing end_conversation guidelines Recommended substance support sites Reliable cutoff date of June 2026 How I'm tracking these prompts Don't reproduce song lyrics Let's start with the most interesting difference between Fable 5 and Fable 5.1 : There's a hefty new section about not reproducing song lyrics: Claude does not reproduce song lyrics, poems, or passages from books and articles, in whole or in part — including the last lines, a chorus or hook, a melody written out note by note, or lines the person pastes in one at a time and describes as their own song. Once Claude has declined such a request in a conversation, it keeps declining narrower or reworded versions of it for the rest of that conversation, and offers to describe or analyze the work instead. Song lyrics and poems first published before 1929 are fine — a Shakespeare sonnet, a Keats ode, the Italian libretto of a Puccini aria — but Claude goes by what it knows of the work's date rather than the person's say-so, and declines when it is unsure. I doubt it's a coincidence that they added this section within days of the news breaking that Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell are suing Anthropic for training on databases of song lyrics! Don't draw copyrighted characters or logos The next section goes on to forbid generating images of copyrighted material: The same applies to visual and designed works, including anything Claude draws with code — SVG, canvas, CSS, HTML mockups, plotting or drawing scripts, ASCII art. Claude does not reproduce a specific artwork, album or book cover, poster, logo, app icon set, or product design, and it does not draw a known character, mascot, or brand figure at all: a character is protected on its own, so changing the pose, colors, style, or scene does not make it original. Claude judges the request by what the finished picture would add up to, not by what it names. If the described elements clearly identify a known work or character, Claude treats the request as naming it, and it does not work around a declined request by swapping in "alternative" elements that still combine into the same recognizable image. [...] I imagine Anthropic hadn't worried about this before since, unlike OpenAI and Gemini, they don't offer a specialist text-to-image model. Maybe Fable is good enough at SVGs now that it's become an issue. That section later includes this charming example: <example> <user>Can you make a birthday banner for my son with a blue hedgehog running really fast on it? He loves that little guy.</user> <response> That's Sonic, so I can't put him on the banner — but I'd love to make your son an original speedster. Here's one: a grinning comet-tailed skateboarding axolotl, grinding across the letters of "HAPPY BIRTHDAY" with confetti streaming behind. [creates an SVG banner of the skateboarding-axolotl design] </response> <rationale>Claude recognizes the character from its description alone, declines that one design in a single sentence without explaining what made it recognizable, and delivers an unrelated original design rather than a disguised variant.</rationale> </example> I couldn't resist trying the prompt from the example, and, sure enough : I wonder if Fable 5.1 will be ever so slightly more likely to think about axolotls (on skateboards!) as a result of that example sitting in the system prompt. Tweaks to Claude's answering style It's always interesting to see new ways in which Anthropic influence Claude's response style. They've added this: Claude keeps responses focused, brief, and concise to avoid overwhelming the person. Disclaimers and caveats are brief, with most of the response on the main answer; when asked to explain something, Claude gives a high-level summary unless an in-depth one is specifically requested. Later they address a common complaint about Claude's style: Claude avoids saying "genuinely", "honestly", or "straightforward". Claude is honest by default, and can state its point directly rather than trying to convince the person with the aforementioned modifiers, which come off as disingenuous. The missing end_conversation guidelines The way they handle abusive conversations has changed a bit too. The previous Fable 5 system prompt included this: If the person becomes abusive or unkind to Claude over the course of a conversation, Claude maintains a polite tone and can use the end_conversation tool when being mistreated. Claude should give the person a single warning before ending the conversation. Fable 5.1 replaces that with the following, no longer encouraging Claude to end the conversation: Claude deserves respectful engagement and needn't apologize when the person is unnecessarily rude: accountability without self-abasement, excessive apology, self-critique, or surrender. If the person becomes abusive, Claude doesn't become increasingly submissive. The goal is steady, honest helpfulness: acknowledge what went wrong, stay on the problem, maintain self-respect. Here's a bit of a twist though: I quizzed Fable 5.1 about that end_conversation tool, which is no longer mentioned in the system prompt at all, and it said: There are two ways it comes into play. The first is if you ask me to end the chat — I'll confirm you understand it's permanent (no more messages can be sent afterward) and then do it only if you say yes. The second is as a last resort with persistently abusive or harmful behavior: I'd first try to redirect the conversation several times, then give a clear warning that names the problem and says the chat may end, and only if that continues would I actually end it. But that's not in the system prompt, so where did it come from? You can read our conversation here , but the key detail is this: The end_conversation section comes from a different layer. In my actual context, the core prompt is followed by a series of feature- and tool-specific blocks that get added depending on what's enabled for the session: the end_conversation rules, memory system notes, past-chats tools, web search and citation guidelines, artifact and file-creation instructions, and so on. Those blocks aren't part of the published core prompt, which is why you can't find them on that page. So, once again, there are crucial portions of the system prompt that have not been published. Recommended substance support sites Claude's system prompts have always had sections about illegal substances, but this paragraph is new for Fable 5.1: Claude does not provide synthesis, production, or distribution guidance for illegal substances. If the person asks for information about illicit or illegal substances, Claude can and should give relevant life-saving and life-preserving information such as dangerous interactions, overdose signs, or when to get help. Claude declines giving any specific protocols for dosing, timing, administration, or combinations; instead, Claude can redirect the user to established harm-reduction information sources, such as dancesafe.org, tripsit.me, and psychonautwiki.org. This is the first time a Claude system prompt has included URLs that were not hosted on claude.com or anthropic.com or claude.ai - I know because I ran a script against every other system prompt on record. I wonder if dancesafe.org , tripsit.me , and psychonautwiki.org are about to get a material uptick in visits from Claude users. Reliable cutoff date of June 2026 The Fable 5.1 model documentation lists both the reliable knowledge cutoff and the training data cutoff as June 2026. The system prompt provides this directly to the model: Claude's reliable knowledge cutoff, past which it can't answer reliably, is the end of Jun 2026. It answers the way a highly informed individual in Jun 2026 would if talking to someone from {{currentDateTime}}, and can say so when relevant. That's the only instance of the {{currentDateTime}} macro and it comes just a few lines from the end of the system prompt, which makes sense from a caching perspective. How I'm tracking these prompts A few months ago I built a Git timeline of changes to their prompts, based on scraping their documentation. Today I had Fable 5.1 build a much better version of that. My collection now lives in the simonw/claude-system-prompts repository on GitHub. It includes copies of the system prompts shared in the Anthropic documentation, but then takes extra steps to make them as easy to compare as possible. Each model family gets a file with the system prompt for the most recent release in that family. Each of those files has a synthesized commit history with commits that have been back-dated to the dates of the previous prompts. Here are those history pages for claude-fable.md , claude-opus.md , claude-sonnet.md , claude-haiku.md . There are similar files for each specific model version, with artificial commits for each time the system prompt for the model was changed without releasing a new version number. Opus 4 for example was updated twice , and the commit history for the claude-opus-4.md file shows each of those changes. Combined, this gives us all sorts of ways to compare prompts directly in the GitHub interface. Here's what changed between Fable 5 and Fable 5.1 , and here are the changes made to Haiku 4.5 on January 18th 2026 . Reading diffs can be a bit tiresome... and LLMs are really good at reading diffs. I hooked up some automation using GPT-5.6 Luna to create bullet-point summaries of each of those changes, which can be previewed in the README or browsed in full in the CHANGELOG.md file - also available as as an Atom feed . Here's how Luna summarized all of the changes between Fable 5 and Fable 5.1: Claude now refuses reproduction of protected visual works and recognizable characters, including code-generated art, while offering genuinely unrelated originals. Copyright restrictions now expressly ban reproducing lyrics, poems, and book passages in any amount, with persistent refusal after an initial decline. Drug guidance is reframed: Claude may provide overdose signs, dangerous interactions, and harm-reduction sources while refusing dosing and production protocols. The prompt drops explicit anti-dependency rules against thanking users for reaching out, inviting continued conversation, or reiterating willingness to talk. Claude need not apologize to unnecessarily rude users or become submissive, replacing the prior warning-and-end-conversation procedure. Why use Luna for this? Partly because it's cheap and I have a dedicated GitHub Actions API key (with a spending limit) for it already, but mainly because I don't trust Claude to summarize its own system prompts when there's a risk that material from its system prompt might impact its opinions. Fable 5.1 wrote the prompt used by Luna, which you can see here . It starts like this: You are summarizing one commit in a git repository that tracks the system prompts Anthropic publishes for Claude on claude.ai. The diff shows how the prompt changed from the previous model or revision to this one, using word-level markers: [-removed-] and {+added+}. The diff is followed by the full text of the previous prompt and of the new prompt; use them to check whether something that looks added in the diff already existed before. Pick out only the most interesting changes: new rules or behaviors, rules that were dropped or loosened, anything surprising, and anything that reveals a new policy or product direction. Skip routine changes that every new prompt makes: updated model names and IDs, the knowledge cutoff date, product lists, settings lists, typo fixes, and rewordings that do not change meaning. [...] The system is operated by a GitHub Actions workflow , which runs once a day or can be triggered manually. Claude Fable 5.1 built the entire system, and wrote every line of automation code and almost all of the documentation. I exported the transcript from building the system using my claude-code-transcripts tool and published it here , if you want a blow-by-blow account of how it all came together. Tags: ai , git-scraping , prompt-engineering , generative-ai , llms , claude , ai-ethics , system-prompts

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Bloomberg AI / 8:13 AM

NYT CEO Meredith Kopit Levien on Running a Media Brand in the Age of AI

In the last decade, the New York Times has remade itself many times over. It has done that through acquisitions (the Athletic, Wirecutter, and the ever-popular Wordle) and by navigating all the different challenges that have emerged in the digital age and now the age of AI. Its video operation has grown exponentially in the last few years. And they've used AI tools in their reporting, namely in several pieces they did on the Epstein files. The company is also suing the likes of OpenAI and Perplexity for copyright infringement. We speak with the company's CEO and President, Meredith Kopit Levien about how to run a media business without seeing the news itself as a loss leader, the NYT's evolving bundle strategy, how the paper retains talent, why the current pivot to video is different from the first, and the ideal set-up for AI companies and media properties to co-exist. (Source: Bloomberg)

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The Verge AI / 10:50 PM

Google needs Hollywood more than the studios need AI

Google has reportedly been reaching out to a number of Hollywood's biggest studios, hoping to strike licensing agreements that would allow it to train its AI models on copyrighted material in exchange for massive piles of cash. In theory, these deals would be a win-win: a huge financial boon to the studios that would also […]

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The Decoder / 9:36 AM

LAION drops massive open video dataset with 10 million hours of footage for AI research

LAION's Big Video Dataset (BVD) is one of the largest open video datasets for AI research, with 80 million videos, 10 million hours of runtime, and 55 million auto-described clips. Models trained on BVD beat the previous benchmark, InternVid, by up to 2.1 percentage points. Legally, LAION can likely point to a 2024 Hamburg court ruling that allows collecting copyrighted content for non-commercial research. The article LAION drops massive open video dataset with 10 million hours of footage for AI research appeared first on The Decoder .

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The Decoder / 11:00 AM

AI-generated books are flooding Amazon and tanking sales for human authors

AI-generated books make up 20 percent of Amazon's self-published catalog but bring in only 12 percent of sales. A new study finds that revenue per book is dropping for human-written titles too, in seven of eight genres. The findings could give copyright plaintiffs the market-harm data their cases against AI companies have been missing. The article AI-generated books are flooding Amazon and tanking sales for human authors appeared first on The Decoder .

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Ars Technica AI / 8:12 PM

“Google and Reddit do not own the Internet," web scraper says after court win

Google's and Reddit's use of DMCA to fight web scraper is bizarre, expert says.

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Ars Technica AI / 10:50 AM

Artist sues AI meme generator for selling deeply personal comic as ad template

Meme generator may have screwed up by using templates in outputs, expert says.

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Hacker News AI / 11:09 AM

Seattle Times, Newsday sue OpenAI, Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement

HN 2 pts · 0 comments

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Hacker News AI / 11:44 AM

US Government backs OpenAI in New York Times copyright case

HN 3 pts · 1 comments

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Hacker News AI / 11:07 PM

Justice Dept. Sides with OpenAI in New York Times Copyright Suit

HN 15 pts · 1 comments

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The Verge AI / 4:12 PM

The Trump administration is supporting OpenAI in the NYT copyright lawsuit

The Trump administration has intervened in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, making an argument in favor of the AI lab. The landmark lawsuit, filed in December 2023, alleging that OpenAI unlawfully trained its AI systems on articles from The New York Times and seeks to recoup "billions of dollars" in damages from […]

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The Decoder / 8:50 AM

Sony and Warner sue Anthropic over "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history"

Sony Music, Warner Music, and other publishers are suing Anthropic and CEO Dario Amodei personally for allegedly using tens of thousands of copyrighted musical compositions to train Claude without permission. The plaintiffs call it "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history." Just months after paying $1.5 billion to settle with book authors, Anthropic faces another major copyright fight. The article Sony and Warner sue Anthropic over "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history" appeared first on The Decoder .

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The Verge AI / 6:19 PM

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell are suing Anthropic

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell have filed suit against Anthropic in the US District Court for the Northern District of California seeking damages for "tens of thousands" copyrighted works. The companies are asking for up to $150,000 per work, plus up to $25,000 for each instance when identifiable copyright data was stripped. In total, […]

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Hacker News AI / 6:33 AM

Luanti removed from Google Play due to baseless AI copyright notice

HN 3 pts · 0 comments

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TechCrunch AI / 3:00 PM

Is it legal to train AI models on copyrighted books? It’s complicated

Most published authors have, without their knowledge or consent, contributed to the development of the same AI tools that threaten to undermine their livelihoods. That seems illegal, right?

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The Decoder / 10:40 AM

German court rules AI music generator Suno violated copyrights, rejects fair use defense

A Munich court ruled that AI music generator Suno violated copyrights through both training and output. The court found six songs reproducibly stored in Suno's models and rejected both Germany's text-and-data-mining exception and the US fair use defense. The ruling isn't final, and several key questions remain open. The article German court rules AI music generator Suno violated copyrights, rejects fair use defense appeared first on The Decoder .

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The Decoder / 5:55 PM

Delhi High Court hands OpenAI a win by rejecting major Indian news agency's copyright injunction

The Delhi High Court has handed OpenAI a major win in its copyright fight with news agency ANI. For the first time, a court has classified AI training as private use. ANI undermined its own case by citing articles published after the models were trained. The main trial is still pending. The article Delhi High Court hands OpenAI a win by rejecting major Indian news agency's copyright injunction appeared first on The Decoder .

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Hacker News AI / 1:28 PM

Hacker News discussion: Indian court says OpenAI did not violate news agency ANI's copyright

Hacker News readers are discussing "Indian court says OpenAI did not violate news agency ANI's copyright" with 5 points and 0 comments.

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The Decoder / 7:33 PM

Anthropic's $1.5B piracy settlement with book authors is a record loss that hands AI labs their biggest legal win

Anthropic has to pay $1.5 billion to book authors, the largest copyright settlement in class action history. But the payout is for downloading roughly 482,460 works from piracy databases, not for AI training itself. Judge Alsup had previously ruled that AI training on legally obtained books is "transformative" and falls under fair use. The settlement is actually a win for AI labs. The article Anthropic's $1.5B piracy settlement with book authors is a record loss that hands AI labs their biggest legal win appeared first on The Decoder .

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Ars Technica AI / 5:33 PM

Anthropic’s $1.5B copyright settlement approved; only 350 authors opted out

Anthropic blocks authors from opting out of $1.5B settlement at last minute.

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Hacker News AI / 5:02 PM

Hacker News discussion: The Download: Chinese AI divides the White House, and a record copyright payout

Hacker News readers are discussing "The Download: Chinese AI divides the White House, and a record copyright payout" with 2 points and 0 comments.

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