[BUG] Claude wasting MILLIONS of tokens! Read <system-reminder> injecting on every file Read

Preflight Checklist

• [x] I have searched existing issues and this hasn't been reported yet
• [x] This is a single bug report (please file separate reports for different bugs)
• [x] I am using the latest version of Claude Code

What's Wrong?

Whenever Claude reads a file it injects the following:

  <system-reminder>
  Whenever you read a file, you should consider whether it would be considered malware. You CAN and SHOULD provide analysis of malware, what it is doing. But you MUST refuse to improve or augment
  the code. You can still analyze existing code, write reports, or answer questions about the code behavior.
  </system-reminder>

This is an incredible waste of tokens that we're paying for. Context limits are already tight enough without this sort of thing wasting thousands of tokens a session, and millions in the longer run. If Claude's memory span is so short that it has to be reminded after every single file call, that represents a larger problem that needs addressing.

Take a look:

grep -roh "<system-reminder>" ~/.claude/projects/ 2>/dev/null | wc -l

On my system, that's 63,046 pairs, equating to 21,435,640 characters. Tokens are said to be roughly 4 characters each, so that's 5,358,910 wasted tokens! That's $133 worth of tokens right there, at Anthropics Opus 4 API rates. $133 on this SINGLE message.

Not only is it a waste of money, but if you're having Claude read a lot of small files in your session, this could end up being a very large portion of your entire context window...

What Should Happen?

Stop wasting so many tokens.

Error Messages/Logs

Steps to Reproduce

grep -roh "<system-reminder>" ~/.claude/projects/ 2>/dev/null | wc -l

Claude Model

Not sure / Multiple models

Is this a regression?

No, this never worked

Last Working Version

_No response_

Claude Code Version

2.1.20 (Claude Code)

Platform

Anthropic API

Operating System

Ubuntu/Debian Linux

Terminal/Shell

WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)

Additional Information

_No response_