Huh, I just assumed Gemini was getting timestamps and Claude isn’t. That’s kind of funny that it uses the web search tool to get the time. Claude on the web has a user_time_v0 tool and it seems to work:
It’s 12:27 PM on Friday, May 22, 2026, in your timezone (PDT, UTC-7). Just past noon — lunchtime in Redmond.
(The city is correct too)
Claude Code said it doesn’t have this tool but would just run the date command if it needed the time. Also, it only knows the time zone because of my CLAUDE.md.
Yeah, I’m not sure if either model’s account can be trusted. Gemini displays the ‘searching the web’ banner when I ask, yet claims to get the time from a prompt-injected timestamp. Claude claims not to have access to a tool to retrieve any up to date time or location data, yet it sounds like you’re able to get that via the user_time_v0 tool. Did you have to somehow prompt Claude to use that tool?
I re-opened the conversation from earlier today where it mentioned the tool and just prompted it to lookup the time using the tool. The “Check current time” tool call summary suggests that this is a real tool, and it did this mid-conversation and got the exact correct time and city:
I’m not sure if it matters but this was on the Android app.
Huh, I just tried prompting it “can you look up the current time using the user_time_v0 tool?”, but it said it has no access to such a tool. I’m using the browser chat interface on my laptop. Just got out my phone (iPhone) and tried it, and it got the time correct. So yeah, I’m thinking it’s a phone vs. computer browser discrepancy in available tools.
Huh, I just assumed Gemini was getting timestamps and Claude isn’t. That’s kind of funny that it uses the web search tool to get the time. Claude on the web has a
user_time_v0tool and it seems to work:(The city is correct too)
Claude Code said it doesn’t have this tool but would just run the
datecommand if it needed the time. Also, it only knows the time zone because of my CLAUDE.md.Yeah, I’m not sure if either model’s account can be trusted. Gemini displays the ‘searching the web’ banner when I ask, yet claims to get the time from a prompt-injected timestamp. Claude claims not to have access to a tool to retrieve any up to date time or location data, yet it sounds like you’re able to get that via the user_time_v0 tool. Did you have to somehow prompt Claude to use that tool?
I re-opened the conversation from earlier today where it mentioned the tool and just prompted it to lookup the time using the tool. The “Check current time” tool call summary suggests that this is a real tool, and it did this mid-conversation and got the exact correct time and city:
I’m not sure if it matters but this was on the Android app.
(The random Spanish is from my system prompt)
Huh, I just tried prompting it “can you look up the current time using the user_time_v0 tool?”, but it said it has no access to such a tool. I’m using the browser chat interface on my laptop. Just got out my phone (iPhone) and tried it, and it got the time correct. So yeah, I’m thinking it’s a phone vs. computer browser discrepancy in available tools.