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Comment by SparkyMcUnicorn

2 months ago

100% sure. Tested in the Anthropic workbench[0] to double check and got the same result.

The web interface has a prompt that defines a cutoff date and who's president[1].

[0] https://console.anthropic.com/workbench

[1] https://docs.anthropic.com/en/release-notes/system-prompts#c...

Can confirm the workbench does with `claude-sonnet-4-20250514` returns Biden (with a claimed April 2024 cutoff date) while Chat returns Trump (as encoded in the system prompt, with no cutoff date mention). Interesting

  • They encoded that trump is president in the system prompt? That's afwully specific information to put in the system prompt

    • Most of their training data says that Biden is president, because it was created/scraped pre-2025. AI models have no concept of temporal context when training on a source.

      People use "who's the president?" as a cutoff check (sort of like paramedics do when triaging a potential head injury patient!), so they put it into the prompt. If people switched to asking who the CEO of Costco is, maybe they'd put that in the prompt too.

  • Some models do have US 2025 president election results explicitly given in system prompt. To fool all who use it for cutoff check.