What is CL4R1T4S?

CL4R1T4S (a stylized spelling of "claritas" — Latin for clarity) is an open-source repository collecting extracted and leaked system prompts from major AI products and coding assistants. With 24,400 stars on GitHub and an AGPL-3.0 license, it has become the go-to reference for AI transparency researchers, red teamers, and developers who want to understand what instructions power the AI tools they use daily.

What's Inside

The repository organizes system prompts by company and product into separate folders:

The Transparency Argument

The project's premise is that AI system prompts function as invisible governance layers — they determine how models respond to users, what topics they avoid, and how they represent their own capabilities. CL4R1T4S argues that "in order to trust the output, one must understand the input."

For security researchers, having reference system prompts enables:

• Prompt injection testing: Understanding baseline instructions helps identify injection attack surfaces
• Behavior consistency auditing: Comparing intended vs. observed behavior across AI deployments
• Red teaming: Structured adversarial testing informed by actual system constraints

Community and Research Value

Beyond red teaming, the repository serves AI researchers comparing how different companies approach safety guardrails, persona maintenance, and tool-use instructions. Developers building with AI APIs use it to benchmark their own system prompts against industry practices.

Why It Matters

As AI systems take on more autonomous roles — writing code, browsing the web, executing tasks — understanding the instructions they operate under becomes a matter of public interest. CL4R1T4S occupies a contested but important space: making the invisible visible, and treating AI system design as something open to scrutiny rather than permanent trade secret.