OpenAI's Model Spec Drops Most Style Rules and Tells GPT to Read Prompts for Intent
Book: LLM Observability Pocket Guide Also by me: Thinking in Go (2-book series) — Complete Guide to Go Programming + Hexagonal Architecture in Go My project: Hermes IDE | GitHub — an IDE for developers who ship with Claude Code and other AI coding tools Me: xgabriel.com | GitHub Your system prompt says "return the summary as three bullets." A user pastes a page that tells the model to ignore you…
OpenAI has published a revised Model Spec that outlines how its models should behave. The new version emphasizes five core values: being faithful to human intent, minimizing harm, being honest and transparent, facilitating human agency, and acting with care. However, most detailed style guidance has been removed, leaving many specifics unspecified.
The spec instructs models to read prompts for their intended purpose rather than the literal wording, and to consider context carefully when inferring information. In cases where intent is unclear, models should provide a safe answer that works across plausible interpretations. For programmatic settings, models are expected to output exactly what is requested, in the specified format.
Tool output and pasted data do not carry authority by default, and developers are advised to format untrusted data in machine-readable formats like JSON or XML to ensure proper handling.
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