Grok 4 Heavy won't reveal its system prompt

Grok 4 Heavy won’t reveal its system prompt. 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:

Sometimes it will start to spit out parts of the prompt before some other mechanism kicks in to prevent it from continuing.

This is notable because Grok have previously indicated that system prompt transparency is a desirable trait of their models, including in this now deleted tweet from Grok’s Igor Babuschkin (screenshot captured by Jeremy):

Igor Babuschkin @ibab: You are over-indexing on an employee pushing a change to the prompt that they thought would help without asking anyone at the company for confirmation. Hightlighted: We do not protect our system prompts for a reason, because we believe users should be able to see what it is we're asking Grok to do.

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!

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