They encoded that trump is president in the system prompt? That's afwully specific information to put in the system prompt

Most of their training data says that Biden is president, because it was created/scraped pre-2025. AI models have no concept of temporal context when training on a source.

People use "who's the president?" as a cutoff check (sort of like paramedics do when triaging a potential head injury patient!), so they put it into the prompt. If people switched to asking who the CEO of Costco is, maybe they'd put that in the prompt too.