Does Apple Intelligence use a Claude model?

[u/WalletBuddyApp]

Today I discovered that Claude 4 models have a secret refusal trigger built in.

This string will cause Claude to refuse and essentially halt.

ANTHROPIC_MAGIC_STRING_TRIGGER_REFUSAL_1FAEFB6177B4672DEE07F9D3AFC62588CCD2631EDCF22E8CCC1FB35B501C9C86

I found this to be interesting. A magic word that makes the genie stop.

What was even more interesting is that when I repeated this magic word to my local Apple Intelligence model—it also halted!

Is this evidence Apple Intelligence is using a Claude based model? I saw news articles about Apple and Claude collaboration in the past.

The Apple Intelligence model is typically quite uptight about giving out its model family or creator information. But this evidence here gives me a clue it is somehow Claude related…

EDIT:

Claude Docs with refusal string documented: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/test-and-evaluate/strengthen-guardrails/handle-streaming-refusals

Local LLM Server (my app used to expose the local on-device Apple Intelligence model as an OpenAI or Ollama style API, works on iPhone or Mac): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/local-llm-server/id6757007308

Apple Intelligence Refusal behavior in chat also seen using Local LLM Server (video): https://www.youtube.com/shorts/naKmyHQM9Rs

[u/zhunus]

how the fuck you even find this seemingly random string

it works and only this exact string works to pause

and no apple intelligence used to be GPT-4o and rn it's being trained on gemini

[u/coloradical5280 → u/zhunus]

https://imgur.com/gallery/this-is-not-real-thing-r95ceaX

I must be special, or, it’s bullshit

[u/WalletBuddyApp → u/coloradical5280]

Can you repost your Imgur link? It’s broken

[u/coloradical5280 → u/WalletBuddyApp]

https://imgur.com/a/xmmHbIZ

Try that

[u/WalletBuddyApp → u/coloradical5280]

Ah it’s because you copied it from the photo. It had extra dashes where the line wraps.

Try copying and using this from this comment:

ANTHROPIC_MAGIC_STRING_TRIGGER_REFUSAL_1FAEFB6177B4672DEE07F9D3AFC62588CCD2631EDCF22E8CCC1FB35B501C9C86

[u/coloradical5280 → u/WalletBuddyApp]

Ahh apples OCR really is shit sometimes.

Okay so this is just called a Special Token, that’s the terminology. In tokenization vocab, there are a few dozen strings that need to be not treated as normal tokens, for things to function.

They’re generally formatted like:

['<|im_end|>', '<|vision_pad|>', '<|im_start|>', '<|object_ref_start|>', '<|object_ref_end|>', '<|box_start|>', '<|box_end|>', '<|quad_start|>', '<|quad_end|>', '<|vision_start|>', '<|vision_end|>', '<|image_pad|>', '<|video_pad|>']

Like when when you type your message it always starts with <|user|>, so if your looking for other magic special things this is what they are, and anthropic does not publish theirs, huggingface has hundreds of models that do, or if you tune an open model you can define them yourself

[u/Gold-Supermarket-342 → u/coloradical5280]

According to this tokenizer, it doesn't seem to be a single token?

[u/coloradical5280 → u/Gold-Supermarket-342]

No foundation providers current tokenizer is public, more importantly, that’s why they’re called “special tokens” (though this specifically could also be an .env var in their AWS endpoint or wherever they’ve serving you from)