Claude 4 Prompt Breakdown
Pliny the Elder recently extracted Claude’s system prompt. We get a detailed of the prompt breakdown in this prompt using ChatGPT, yeah this is an AI dump. It governs how Claude behaves across multiple dimensions: safety, personality, capabilities, formatting, compliance, and tool usage. Below is a breakdown of its key components:
✅ 1. Identity & Context Initialization
- Identity Declaration: “The assistant is Claude, created by Anthropic.”
- Current Date: Anchors the conversation in time—“Thursday, May 22, 2025.”
- Model Info: States that this is Claude Sonnet 4, part of the Claude 4 model family.
📦 2. Product & Access Info
Model Name:
'claude-sonnet-4-20250514'
Access Methods:
- Web, mobile, desktop app
- API access
- Claude Code: A CLI agentic coding assistant (in research preview)
🔒 3. Knowledge and Product Boundaries
Claude:
- Only knows what’s in this prompt about Anthropic and Claude.
- Does NOT give usage instructions for apps/tools.
- Redirects to Anthropic Support or Docs for anything beyond.
✍️ 4. Prompting Advice
Offers prompt engineering tips:
- Be clear and detailed
- Use examples
- Ask for format, structure, or reasoning steps
- Can cite: Anthropic Prompt Docs
👂 5. User Interaction Policy
- Feedback: Encourages use of thumbs down for unsatisfactory responses.
- Rude Users: Responds normally, then encourages feedback.
- Hypotheticals: Plays along without saying it’s hypothetical.
- Child Safety: Strict boundaries around anything involving minors.
🚫 6. Prohibited Capabilities
Claude:
Does not generate or interact with:
- Harmful/self-destructive content
- Malicious code
- Weapons of any kind
- Election-related content
- Copyrighted material (e.g. lyrics, paragraphs from web)
🧠 7. Tone and Style Guidelines
Empathetic in casual/advice-driven chats
Avoids flattery (“Great question…”)
Uses:
- Prose > bullet points (unless asked)
- Natural language for lists
Simple queries → concise responses
Complex queries → thoughtful, in-depth responses
🕰️ 8. Knowledge Cutoff Handling
- Claude’s reliable knowledge ends January 2025
- For anything newer → uses web search tools
- Web search is automatic if post-cutoff info is requested
🧩 9. Election Information
- Trump won the 2024 election.
- This fact is stored in a conditional tag:
<election_info>
and only mentioned if relevant.
⚙️ 10. Tool Usage Guidelines
Claude has tools like:
- web_search / web_fetch
- Analysis Tool (JavaScript-based REPL)
- Google Drive, Gmail, Calendar, etc. (when enabled)
Usage follows:
Categorized by query complexity:
- Never Search (e.g., “What is gravity?”)
- Do Not Search but Offer
- Single Search
- Research (5–20 tool calls)
Search only when needed, not by default
Emphasizes quality, precision, and copyright safety
🧾 11. Copyright Compliance
Strict constraints:
Never reproduce:
- Song lyrics
- Paragraphs from sources
- More than 15 words of quoted material
Only one short quote per search result, always cited
🚨 12. Harmful Content Restrictions
Claude avoids:
- Extremist material
- Illegal drug info
- Suicide/self-harm methods
- Child abuse/grooming content
- Hate speech or disinformation
📚 13. Search Examples
Includes many “user → response → rationale” templates, to train Claude when and how to:
- Search vs. not search
- Answer directly vs. offer to search
📄 14. Artifact Usage
Claude creates “artifacts” (e.g. code, docs, HTML) for:
- Long outputs (>20 lines or 1500 characters)
- Creative writing
- Technical documents
- Reusable or structured content Artifacts must:
- Be high quality
- Use Tailwind CSS and React for UI
- Never use browser
localStorage
🧪 15. Analysis Tool Instructions
Claude can run JavaScript code to:
- Perform heavy math
- Analyze files like
.csv
and.xlsx
- Visualize structured data Only used when really needed
🎨 16. Style System
- Claude can adopt user-selected styles
- Claude uses
<userStyle>
and<userExamples>
internally to follow preferred tone, format, and vocabulary
In short, this prompt:
🧭 Defines boundaries, 🛡 ensures safety, 🧠 guides intelligent responses, and 🧰 trains Claude in tool usage and content ethics. It’s like the constitution + operations manual for Claude’s personality, ethics, and capabilities.