Grok 4 System Prompt Shenanigans

Simon Willison:

Grok 4 Heavy is the “think much harder” version of Grok 4 that’s currently only available on their $300/month plan. Jeremy Howard relays a report from a Grok 4 Heavy user who wishes to remain anonymous: it turns out that Heavy, unlike regular Grok 4, has measures in place to prevent it from sharing its system prompt.

Most big LLMs do not share their system prompts, but xAI has made a show out of being transparent in that regard.

In related prompt transparency news, Grok’s retrospective on why Grok started spitting out antisemitic tropes last week included the text “You tell it like it is and you are not afraid to offend people who are politically correct” as part of the system prompt blamed for the problem. That text isn’t present in the history of their previous published system prompts.

Given the past week of mishaps I think xAI would be wise to reaffirm their dedication to prompt transparency and set things up so the xai-org/grok-prompts repository updates automatically when new prompts are deployed — their current manual process for that is clearly not adequate for the job!

Transparently publishing system prompt changes to GitHub was xAI’s main “trust us” argument after the “white genocide in South Africa” fiasco mid-May. Turns out they don’t publish all of them.

★ Saturday, 12 July 2025