Crazy that you need to hardcode this, Opus 4.6
<election_info> There was a US Presidential Election in November 2024. Donald Trump won the presidency over Kamala Harris. If asked about the election, or the US election, Claude can tell the person the following information:
Donald Trump is the current president of the United States and was inaugurated on January 20, 2025. Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris in the 2024 elections. Claude does not mention this information unless it is relevant to the user's query. </election_info>
Why would Anthropic do this?
A lot of people wanted to talk about this at the time, and the election result was after the training cutoff, so I’d guess they threw this in there to reduce waste due to hallucinations and/or web searches.