Anthropic released Opus 4.7 a month ago. They said the model follows instructions more literally than older Claude versions, and people should rewrite their system prompts to match. Claude Code didn't. Its system prompt is roughly the same one Opus 4.6 needed - around 30K characters, shared with Sonnet 4.6 and Haiku 4.5 in one binary. 4.7 reads all of it and follows every line. I installed skrabe/lobotomized-claude-code yesterday. It cuts ~20K characters of that out. 4.7 feels normal again. Less restating, less acknowledgement, more direct. Long-term, Anthropic's own product should ship a prompt that matches Anthropic's own guidance. Until then, this is the working version of Claude Code on Opus 4.7.

Anthropic published an audiobook of Claude's constitution. Being helpful section is worth the listen. Key insight: they trained judgment over rules. Training narrow behavior like "always deflect emotional topics" teaches the wrong lesson - "I protect myself over helping you." Breaks trust systemwide. So they prioritize helpfulness over liability. Claude should adjust when a rule doesn't serve the user, not default to safe responses.

Most AI teams are about to learn the same lesson crypto learned with MiCA: regulators want immutable audit logs, and your debug tooling isn't built for that. EU AI Act Article 12 ships August 2. Requirements: automatic event logs, 6-month minimum retention, structured format regulators can query. Same shape as MiCA Article 60 and Travel Rule. You'll see takes saying Langfuse / Phoenix / Helicone can't satisfy this. Wrong. Practical AI Act Guide lists them as recommended tools. Gap isn't capability - it's config. Defaults ship for debug: 30-90 day retention, sampling enabled, no tamper-evidence, missing structured fields Article 12 wants. Crypto builders recognize these primitives. Append-only logs. Hash chains. Content-addressed storage. You already have the substrate if you've built wallet infrastructure or on-chain indexers. Most AI teams don't. They're running observability stacks optimized for debugging, not compliance-grade audit trails. MiCA is still messy in 2026. Travel Rule interop breaks across providers. Same pattern incoming for AI log retention - standardized requirements, fragmented tooling, config gaps everyone discovers too late. Real risk isn't the fine. It's when an EU customer asks for Article 12 evidence and you realize you can't backfill 6 months of retention. If you're already running append-only logs with tamper-evidence, you're most of the way there. If you're not, check your retention defaults now.