OpenAI’s o3 searches the web behind a curtain: you get a few source links and a fuzzy reasoning trace, but never the full chunk of text it actually pulled in. Without that raw context, it’s impossible to audit what really shaped the answer.
I understand why they do it though: if they presented the actual content that came back from search they would absolutely get in trouble for copyright-infringement.
I suspect that's why so much of the Claude 4 system prompt for their search tool is the message "Always respect copyright by NEVER reproducing large 20+ word chunks of content from search results" repeated half a dozen times: https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/25/claude-4-system-prompt...
I find this very hypocritical given that for all intents and purposes the infringement already happened at training time, since most content wasn't acquired with any form of retribution or attribution (otherwise this entire endeavor would not have been economically worth it). See also the "you're not allowed to plagiarize Disney" being done by all commercial text to image providers.
Using just a few words (the name of the team) feels OK to me, though you're welcome to argue otherwise.
The Claude search system prompt is there to ensure that Claude doesn't spit out multiple paragraphs of text from the underlying website, in a way that would discourage you from clicking through to the original source.
Personally I think this is an ethical way of designing that feature.
(Note that the way this works is an entirely different issue from the fact that these models were training on unlicensed data.)