rHXN - Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

civet_java - 16 hours ago

There are some commentors in this thread downplaying the severity of a service provider being less than transparent about exactly what their shipped tooling does on customer's machines.

That the provider's business needs necessitate the this behaviour doesn't justify their lack of honest disclosure. That honest disclosure would render the solution to their problem useless isn't my problem. If anything, that they thought this was acceptable makes me wonder what else they're harvesting from my machine? PII?

The cynic in me can't help but feel that the state of these comments reflects less on the commentor's views of this debacle but rather their feelings about AI/Anthropic/America/what-have-you.

geocar - 28 minutes ago

> That the provider's business needs necessitate the this behaviour...

No, please don't move past this so quick, because I'm not convinced they have the need, and in some markets (like the US) it is a violation of civil rights, to show people different content based on their ethnicity[1] because those people might have a claim that supersedes anything they might have signed or clicked-through.

That Anthropic did something they could obvious be sued for constitutional violations in multiple countries is shocking.

> what else [are] they're harvesting from my machine? PII?

Assume everything, and yet I think this is more insidious than mere exfiltration, and we should go further: The LLM can respond to these magic quote marks directly, which means it can be trained to give people bad/different advice without those markers being so visible to people using debugging tools.

That's so unethical, the laws on this potentially so severe, Anthropic could be facing unlimited damages, from any one example combined with this article, which means either they have a really stupid management team, or were given a promise of legal immunity in some way.

Neither of those things should be what you should want to base your next big idea on.

[1]: For a simple example, showing an ad for (say) mortgage offers and targeting people by race/ethnicity/gender is totally illegal, but it's also illegal if you make a list of targeting criteria that just happen to select for a protected class.

ammo1662 - 4 hours ago

This is not a technical issue or a matter of service agreements.

They totally knew that this would never be accepted by users, and that is precisely why they resorted to obfuscation and steganography to exfiltrate the data. This was quietly added in an update, and would have been removed in a later one had it gone unnoticed.

How is this any different from hiding a drug in food and randomly feeding it to a homeless person as a human trial? Even if that homeless person is an undocumented immigrant, does that make that acceptable?

They crossed the line.

m11a - 3 hours ago

I mean, you’d resort to an obfuscated approach if you thought the ‘malicious’ users would remove your direct telemetry. The other users could be perfectly happy about it, but if you announced the change, obviously the malicious users would hear about it too and disable it.

This isn’t a comment on whether I agree with the change. Just that your analogies aren’t applicable here.

hypfer - 3 hours ago

Anthropic always came off to me as what can shorthand be described as an abusive controlling partner + the resulting relationship.

If you start viewing the conversations around it through that lens, a lot of stuff intuitively clicks into place.

Including this apologism for example.

sixtyj - 3 hours ago

Why would they want to do that when it’s likely that someone will find out anyway and it could turn into a scandal?

One possibility: they wanted to keep it secret because they’re crooks.

Another possibility: there are so many calls that it costs a lot in operating expenses.

Remember when we mentioned that even just saying “hello” at the start of a chat costs extra money for no reason?

So if I create a mechanism on the client side that every transmission uses 4 bytes instead of 40… it is clever way how to spend less.

Of course, it doesn’t excuse them for not mentioning it anywhere… or for hiding it on page 385 of the terms of service… like when the Vogons told Earthlings that the notice about Transgalactic Highway was in the basement on Alpha Centauri :)

hypfer - 3 hours ago

Abusive controlling partners rarely are long-term timeframe rational, because being long-term timeframe rational is at odds with being an abusive controlling partner.

Things do not need to make sense. They often do not. They just appear just enough like they would so that it flies under the radar.

It's all just conway's law. It had to be like this. It cannot be any other way.

dragonwriter - 2 hours ago

> Abusive controlling partners rarely are long-term timeframe rational, because being long-term timeframe rational is at odds with being an abusive controlling partner.

Humans are rarely “long-term timeframe rational” (rational choice theory is very much a known-false model of human behavior on both the individual and aggregate level), but there is nothing about abusively exploiting an initially trusting and eventually dependent telationship that it is inconsistent with long-term rationality.

hypfer - 2 hours ago

I can't really parse this comment, but I also have a feeling that nothing is lost in struggling with that.

actionfromafar - 3 hours ago

> randomly feeding it to a homeless person as a human trial

Would you be shocked if some of the current tech bro companies could with finding such subjects?

kiproping - 14 hours ago

First its the "Chinese" then it will be people using "cyber" capabilities, or "jailbreaking" or "going against Dario" or any other thing they find "objectionable".

ezoe - 14 hours ago

You forgot "Think about the children"

ok123456 - 13 hours ago

Won't somebody please think of the Chinese cyber children!

dackdel - 5 hours ago

what about the "ai children who are hosted on servers in china and usa" think about them too

bot403 - 4 hours ago

I asked Claude to think of the children. It worked for three minutes, came up with a plan, and charged me $9.

FooBarWidget - 4 hours ago

Their terms of service already effectively attacks people for criticizing Anthropic. It says that if you use Claude to criticize Anthropic, then you've pre-agreed to pay for their lawyers going after you, and pre-agreed to lose the court case.

throwawayffffas - 4 hours ago

Since Fable if you use Claude to do ML research they find objectionable you are delegated to less capable models.

jknoepfler - 12 hours ago

Don't forget Aunt Tifa. I hear she's a suspect in a swimming-pool knife attack.

pmarreck - 7 hours ago

Textbook slippery-slope fallacy.

appplication - 7 hours ago

I don’t mean to insult you, but it is probably worth refreshing yourself on when slippery slope is actually a fallacy. It’s not correct to suggest logical extension of an established precedent is a slippery slope.

vasco - 5 hours ago

Putting "I don't mean to insult you" before a mild phrase just makes it sound you actually want to insult but in a passive aggressive way.

dspillett - 1 hour ago

I saw it more as “if you are insulted by this reasonable advice, then you are an immature idiot” rather than a more direct insult. Still passive-aggressive, but no insult intended if the reader isn't triggered.

Source: I use similar phrases this way.

taneq - 3 hours ago

You mean there’s a slippery slope from “I don’t mean to insult you” to passively aggressively insulting them? ;)

brookst - 5 hours ago

Slipper slope is always a fallacy. It works as a metaphor, and as a rhetorical device, but the fact that it’s possible to construct a gradient from heaven to hell is not proof that each step in the gradient is inevitable.

It’s a good way to illustrate a potential bad path. But I can construct a slippery slope from commenting on HN to making bioweapons. That should not be seen as evidence that HN commenters are likely to do such a thing, and should not be used as an argument to forego (or ban) commenting on HN.

jonathanstrange - 3 hours ago

That's not correct. Many slippery slope arguments are perfectly valid and sound, namely whenever there is plausible evidence for the existence of the respective slippery slope. It can for instance be based on historical precedents, or on probabilistic or convincing balance of consideration sub-arguments for the slippery slope premise.

Whether its a fallacy or not depends a lot on how warranted the slippery slope premise is (notwithstanding other, possible logical errors that might me made in setting up the argument, of course).

Finbel - 6 hours ago

Textbook fallacy fallacy.

avadodin - 49 minutes ago

Fallacy fallacy(and variants) implies there is a fallacy in the first place.

If the slope is slippery, it is not a fallacy to conclude that things will slide when placed on it.

Claiming something is a fallacy —when it is not— is simply a false statement of fact.

someonebaggy - 27 minutes ago

For a slippery slope there has to be something about the slope that makes you start at the top. If you can go to any point on the slope, it isn't even a slope.

Anthropic can start censoring criticism of Dario completely independently from whether or not they censor Deepseek.

gleenn - 14 hours ago

Whether or not you find Anthropic's behavior bad, theybhave been very loudly stating the foreign labs have been distilling their models for a while now. This seems like an obvious response to me that would be a mechanism to make that obvious.

bayindirh - 14 hours ago

From my understanding, distilling the model with another model is not illegal per se. Also, the output of the LLM is public domain by law, too.

So, why all this "effort" to protect the model? This is a free market, and moving fast and breaking things is the norm.

If they are so adamant on protecting their IP, maybe they can start by respecting others' IP, so we can start talking about ethics, equality and playing fair.

filoleg - 13 hours ago

> distilling the model with another model is not illegal per se.

Just because it is legal, that doesn't mean Anthropic wouldn't reasonably want to prevent that from happening (which, from my understanding, isn't illegal either).

bayindirh - 13 hours ago

I love the asymmetry. When small fish tries to protect itself, big fish hits small fish with "It's not illegal" pole.

When small fish points out that what the big fish is crying about is "not illegal", big fish has the right to be above the law to prevent the problem themselves.

Having values requires equality. They have lost the right to cry foul when they trained their model with "but it's fair use" card. Life works by reaping what you sow. Now they are at the reaping stage.

lmz - 13 hours ago

"It's not illegal" is only an argument against lawsuits / law enforcement involvement. Those PoW anti-AI things people put on pages aren't illegal either.

bayindirh - 13 hours ago

No. From my interactions, I have understood that some people use the same argument to wash their consciences from any guilt. What they do is unethical, but not illegal, and they hide under the same argument to drown the ethical angle.

In other words, being honest to oneself is important.

Anti-scraping measures people utilize are neither unethical nor illegal. That’s the difference.

epestr - 8 hours ago

It's good to agree that some don't have a conscience, and maintaining an appearance matters more. And appearances change based on what's legal or not.

They could detect the other AI labs and also silently burn the tokens at a faster rate providing fewer tokens for money, which does sound illegal to me.

The comments only further prove that without more regulation around this, big AI wouldn't have a "don't be evil" attitude going forward.

Forgeties79 - 2 hours ago

Anyone who called for regulations/guardrails of any kind were shouted down as Luddites who hate progress. We all knew this was going to be a mess but $$$ so screw it right?

DrewADesign - 10 hours ago

I’m still frequently shocked by the entitlement people feel to other people’s work/ideas/data/bandwidth/server load, to feed a multi-trillion dollar industry. I find the totally cynical “well when you’re making an omelet…” types to be a bit pathetic, but I understand their motivation— they’re simply greedy. But I just can’t understand the genuine indignation about people attempting to limit or stop ingestion of their own work, even if it’s just for the bandwidth costs. Go ingest your own shit.

windexh8er - 7 hours ago

I often wonder what those people are like IRL. I'd surmise they're the people that are easy to hate. Greedy and intolerable yet want to be the focus.

TeMPOraL - 9 hours ago

> I love the asymmetry.

Much as I hate to defend companies climbing to success and pulling up the ladder afterwards, this asymmetry you note is kind of the whole point a company would want to grow big. Growing an organization has some super-linear costs and generally sucks for most individuals living through it - including the management - but it's still considered worth it, precisely because big entities can do things small entities cannot, and escape the threats from smaller competitors.

It's so basic it's actually part of the reason we exist, and animals of various sizes exist, and generally why evolution didn't stop at single-cellular life.

> They have lost the right to cry foul when they trained their model with "but it's fair use" card. Life works by reaping what you sow. Now they are at the reaping stage.

Yup. Except what they're reaping is insane cashflow and ability to pull stunts like these. We can call out the hypocrisy until our throats run dry, and in ideal fantasy land this would've meant something, but here in the real world, they sow the seeds of success, and now are reaping the right to be hypocritical and continue to get away with it.

podocarp - 6 hours ago

I've actually heard it quite a few times from different people who want to climb the greasy pole to get heard or resources. Idk it just seems rather soulless and slightly psycho to me. It also seems like that kind of system is rather broken and unstable, if the only way you get impact is to climb up the ladder and whatever that entails.

Change this from humans to companies and I still think it feels slightly wrong.

marcus_holmes - 8 hours ago

I disagree with your assessment that large organisations are beneficial.

We can see with our current crop of large organisations that they really struggle to create anything new; most of their new products or services were developed by a small organisation and then acquired. A lot of those products are then enshittified and badly managed because large organisation politics screws things up.

Large organisations are inefficient (everyone has stories of people in large organisations literally doing nothing all day). They are horrible to work for because of the politics. They mistreat their customers and their employees. Their executives tend to lose touch with reality, surround themselves with yes-folk and descend into authoritarian psychopathy.

My personal opinion is that we would be much, much, better off if we had fewer large organisations and more smaller organisations.

gwerbin - 8 hours ago

They are beneficial for those with an equity stake. That much is clear.

usrusr - 2 hours ago

Needs a little more precision: not "those with an equity stake": those with a disproportionally large equity stake.

Otherwise it's just an opener for the old excuse of "they might be ruining your life, but it's all good, it's also your pension fund, little man, that's profiting from your life getting ruined, you should celebrate them!"

marcus_holmes - 5 hours ago

Agreed. And for oligarchs.

TeMPOraL - 12 minutes ago

And I disagree with yours :).

Large organizations are necessary if you want things like airplanes and rockets and computers and MRI machines to exist. And if you feel you benefit from those things yourself, then large organizations that create and operate[0] them are beneficial to you, too.

> A lot of those products are then enshittified and badly managed because large organisation politics screws things up.

That's not caused by org size. It's how modern economics work because of ad-backed business models and few other things (a tangent for another time). Importantly, small orgs and especially startups are very much complicit in this - the venture capital business model in software settled around a symbiosis, where startups create toys (er, MVPs) and growth-hack the shit out of them, in hopes of winning an acquisition or IPO lottery (aka. "exit"), where a big org buys the whole thing for ${a lot}, and enshittifies it further in an attempt of extracting a positive multiple of ${a lot} from the market. Both sides know what they're doing, exits are planned from day 1, and at no point in this process "creating useful products" is ever a driving goal.

Note this symbiosis: it's a recurring theme.

> Large organisations are inefficient

In some ways. Small organizations are inefficient in others. More at the end.

> (everyone has stories of people in large organisations literally doing nothing all day).

Some (not all) cases of this are about maintaining slack in the system, which is necessary for efficiency. A system at 100% capacity is extremely fragile to breaking completely due to tiny, random workload spikes. Breakage is inefficient. Some degree of idle capacity improves overall efficiency.

> They mistreat their customers and their employees. Their executives tend to lose touch with reality, surround themselves with yes-folk and descend into authoritarian psychopathy.

That description fits small business owners much better IMO. In our times, at least in non-failed western countries, there's a limit to how abusive or careless a large organization can be with their customers or employees - their very size makes them easy to target legally. It might be hard to get through their well-funded legal defense, unless the case is slam dunk, but that's still much better than the armies of small businesses flying completely under the radar, flagrantly violating basic health and safety regulations, or flat out lying to customers in their face, because they're not worth the effort of investigating.

(Of course I'm using a biased sample; I don't know many CEOs of big orgs.)

Symbiosis angle: for abusive practices they can't get away with on their own, big organizations are more than happy to outsource to small orgs and then look the other way.

--

Anyway, key point: *there is no categorical difference between "large organizations" and "small organizations". You need a certain amount of people and communication (and capital) to do high-complexity endeavors. The difference between a well-integrated big corporation, and a hundred of small businesses that kinda end up together delivering something big, is just that the latter is using the market as management layer.

And yes, you need big orgs to create things like commercial airplanes and MRIs, simply because the big org is a boundary layer, within which you have a non-market based incentive structure, and this lets you build things the free market just cannot reach on its own.

--

[0] - Airports and hospitals are themselves large organizations.

qwertytyyuu - 3 hours ago

At risk of losing the metaphor, they reaped stuff across all the lands, even ones that were not theirs, and it is questionbale that they even did most of the sowing in the first place

calcifer - 4 hours ago

> Much as I hate to defend companies climbing to success and pulling up the ladder afterwards

Based on your post, you don't sound like you hate it at all.

tripzilch - 3 hours ago

> It's so basic it's actually part of the reason we exist, and animals of various sizes exist, and generally why evolution didn't stop at single-cellular life.

It's also quite natural to want it to stop at individual human life instead of us getting absorbed by some next bigger thing.

Which I'm fairly sure is also the desire (as far as they can be said to have any) of these animals of various sizes you speak of.

> We can call out the hypocrisy until our throats run dry, and in ideal fantasy land this would've meant something, but here in the real world, they sow the seeds of success

Just because they pulled a mirage over people's eyes doesn't mean it suddenly became the "real" world.

jonathanstrange - 2 hours ago

What Anthropic is doing is illegal in many jurisdictions. I don't know about the legal situation for the Chinese domains they mark, but steganographic data extraction without user consent would definitely be illegal in the EU, for example.

redsocksfan45 - 2 hours ago

[dead]

Philpax - 11 hours ago

It's not illegal to distil the traces, but it is also not illegal for them to try to stop it.

chii - 6 hours ago

Imagine an electricity generating company saying that they don't allow their electricity to be used to cold start a competitor's generator.

brookst - 5 hours ago

Do you think software should be regulated as a utility?

tripzilch - 3 hours ago

> Do you think software should be regulated as a utility?

I do think that AI models that were trained using the biggest intellectual property heist in human history should be a utility for all, yes.

brookst - 5 minutes ago

I would 100% support this as long as the same is true for human works. Every artist is trained on thousands of years of art tradition. Copyright wasn’t a thing for the first many millennia of artistic creation, and we still got Bach and Michelangelo.

the_other - 4 hours ago

AI probably should be. The bulk of its efficacy comes from the work of “everyone else” (in loose terms). AI also aims/hope/threatens to replace such a large number and range of jobs that it probabky should be a commons.

darkwater - 3 hours ago

Wise words. And probably in a few years more people will think the same, but now most are blinded by the gold rush or the hate for it.

sakisv - 4 hours ago

Depends on the software.

In this case, the companies that make and provide AI models that are increasingly used to interact with me on critical things (banks, public sector services) then yes.

Abso-fucking-lutely they should be regulated like crazy.

In fact I'm really surprised by the amount of people that are not worried by how many parts of their lives are being handed over to be managed by a probabilistic system that is controlled by a private company with next to zero oversight.

There must be a greater liability than "oops, you're right to push back"

bot403 - 4 hours ago

Software, no. But maybe eventually AI and tokens are a public utility.

sumedh - 2 hours ago

AI companies say people will buy intelligence like they buy electricity.

zaphirplane - 13 hours ago

> Also, the output of the LLM is public domain by law

Why so? Also there is a lot of code in ironically claude and ChatGPT that’s generated by LLM . Yet I haven’t seen the public domain code

bayindirh - 13 hours ago

See: https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2026/03/us-supreme-court-de...

danlitt - 13 hours ago

The code is not eligible for copyright. If they do not give you a copy of the source code, that does not matter. And if you don't know which parts were generated by LLM, you can't safely reuse the code.

skissane - 11 hours ago

> And if you don't know which parts were generated by LLM, you can't safely reuse the code.

I speculate this could be a real issue in future copyright infringement lawsuits.

The plaintiff bears the burden of proving that the code they claim is copyrighted by them actually is copyright. If it is known that large parts of it were generated by LLM, they’d need evidence to demonstrate sufficient human input to establish copyrightability. If they’ve kept highly detailed traces of the development process, that could be rather straightforward; if they haven’t, it could be really difficult.

Now, that’s true in the US, which never accepted mere “sweat of the brow” as a basis for copyright; the UK courts have, and most of the Anglosphere follows the UK on this more than the US.

The other factor: when dealing with an (almost) trillion dollar corporation, even if you’ll win the legal argument, they may bankrupt you with legal fees before the argument is ever properly heard.

But I suspect the precedents on this topic are going to be established by lawsuits involving far smaller actors.

(IANAL and I speculate only for myself, not any present, past or future employers.)

kalkin - 7 hours ago

> The code is not eligible for copyright.

This is very much not what the linked case established.

plasticeagle - 3 hours ago

According to the link:

"The US Copyright Office and federal courts require human authorship for copyright protection; works created solely by AI are not eligible for registration under the current rules."

The Supreme Court declined to consider a challenge to this rule, and so for the moment at least, the rule remains in place.

This means that companies leaning heavily into their LLM use may very well find that they do not, under the law at least, actually own any of their code. As I've read elsewhere there's every possibility that AI code will be the asbestos of the Software Engineering world. Something we'll be trying to get rid of for decades, once everyone comes to their senses.

actionfromafar - 3 hours ago

I think the word "solely" is going to be a tunnel you can drive freight trains through.

So with the asbestos analogy, we encase the fibers in resin and call the whole thing copyrighted.

usrusr - 2 hours ago

Or in other words: there's a big difference between public domain and copyleft and it looks like whoever came up with the asbestos analogy was underestimating that difference.

anon373839 - 9 hours ago

> If they are so adamant on protecting their IP,

What they are trying to protect doesn't qualify as intellectual property. Only 4 categories of IP exist: (1) copyrights; (2) patents; (3) trade secrets; (4) trademarks.

The capabilities embedded in model outputs don't qualify. Machine-generated outputs are ineligible for copyright. They aren't covered by patents. They aren't trade secrets, because the model companies are selling them rather than keeping them secret. And of course, trademarks are conceptually inapplicable.

This leaves the model companies with contract law (ToS) which is pretty inept because it can't bind third parties. And technical measures, like the ones being discussed in the article. And, of course, politics.

Frankly, I think it's pretty ridiculous to even think that models can be protected from being learned from. I feel the Stanford Alpaca team demolished that idea 3 years ago.

eloisius - 6 hours ago

The hypocrisy of the pro-AI mega corp arguments makes my head spin. For three years they’ve been using the example of a human reading books and then outputting creative works influenced by them as analogy for training AI on copyrighted works. Now suddenly we’re supposed to not draw the same parallel about a hypothetical person who learned from Claude and is now outputting creative work based on it.

CMay - 5 hours ago

The usage of the output is probably considered legal. The usage of the service for that purpose may not be, and using it at scale in a dishonest way is not, which is what China has been doing. Countless thousands of separate requests abusing the service (which is not a simple static HTML feed, but an AI service request) for every kind of query to soak up the results.

The post is about what's in the local code, but for a long time there has already been modifications made to the request outputs from the major cloud services as they work together to both curb adversarial distillation and to degrade the quality of training China can get from that distillation.

It's likely not to make the answer wrong or bad, but to make it so that any model trained on the output would not gain the benefit of the model's reasoning generalization skills as easily and also identifying markers that might even link back to request IDs.

The techniques talked about in this post are naive and simplistic, largely because they are released publicly.

It's not as much about protecting IP as much as it is about slowing China down or being able to track the effects of abuse. So many people are talking about greedy company this, greedy company that. The world is not made up of caricatured giant money pigs wearing suits with monocles and gold watches. That is a children's view of Marx's exaggeration on free markets. Bad, greedy people do exist, but if that is your only hammer for every nail then you have a problem.

The upper-bound for how good these models can be is so crazy that it is essentially dual-use military applicable to an extent most other technologies are not. It's not only cyber attacks or biological weapons. Most people are not even built to understand the possible threats.

Why does it matter if China gains those capabilities? I invite you to begin to learn about China's behavior around the world. The CCP is darkside material.

bayindirh - 4 hours ago

> Why does it matter if China gains those capabilities? I invite you to begin to learn about China's behavior around the world. The CCP is darkside material.

Reminds me of this comic: https://xcancel.com/tomgauld/status/571994690289061888?lang=...

None of the superpowers in this world is innocent, and like MAD, more countries have the capability, the better.

I know some of the things CCP do/did. I know some of the things US does/did. I'm from neither, so I don't take sides.

AI's use has been confirmed, or more precisely boasted by two countries in two different wars, and China was not one of these countries.

We have seen the effects of "if they don't know them, they can't exploit them" mindset of NSA for years. Keeping information/technology private is neither beneficial, nor possible. It's only a temporary moat-ish gap. Not a definitive solution.

CMay - 3 hours ago

Certainly the world is full of actions and reactions, nothing is happening in a vacuum. You don't have to be from a country to take sides, but presumably you have some kind of moral compass, some kind of values around personal freedom or the worth of a human life.

There can be a very real cost, because one side comes from an ideology with a history that wants to conquer the entire Earth which caused World War 2 while the other side is trying to prune the planet like a bonsai to prevent it from descending into total chaos to preserve some sense of international order.

Europe was constantly at war, and we helped stabilize it. Middle East as been constantly at war, and if Iran can be sorted then it will be the closest to some sense of peace it's been in a long time.

We used to be in Japan, Philippines, Germany, Vietnam, South Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan and so on. How many are US territories? None. We aren't out there to conquer the globe and take land. We're usually fighting other people's wars for them, because they're up against better resourced opponents. Meanwhile China is over there building artificial islands, ramming other country's ships, creating ideological police stations in countries around the world to harass people and engaging in the most widespread international interference campaigns in human history.

They do not treat their people well and they do not have free speech. The internet is flooded with their propaganda now, because they have a human numbers advantage.

It's true that given time most advantages are temporary, but there's always that slim chance we could slow them down until the CCP collapses and they could become a more normal country.

esarbe - 2 hours ago

You sound like you've swallowed pro-US-propaganda hook, line and sinker.

The reason the middle-east is at constant war is because colonialist machinations. Same goes for south-Saharan Africa. And the US is a big colonialist player, just ask Vietnam, South-America, Iran, Afghanistan, etc. They all have been attacked by the US because of US colonial interests. If anything, one could make the argument that the PRC is treading much more lightly than the US.

That said - I'm not defending the PRC by any way; it's a state-capitalist hell hole that's suppressing workers by denying them any ability to organize and whose political class is purely focused on furthering their own interests and that of the moneyed elite, the common person be damned.

The thing is - so is the US.

arkh - 3 hours ago

> The CCP is darkside material.

And which country has "Black Sites" peppered around the world to detain and interrogate people they don't like?

CMay - 2 hours ago

The US doesn't have black sites anymore and when it did, the interrogation techniques were chosen to avoid physical harm. The results were bad, we didn't like it here in the US even if they were extreme measures for extreme times and so we shut it down. It had a high error rate and generally didn't reflect what we thought was right.

Meanwhile the CCP regularly abducts its own citizens and executes more people than the entire world combined.

someonebaggy - 40 minutes ago

[dead]

dgroshev - 2 hours ago

China? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_police_overseas_servic...

tripzilch - 3 hours ago

> The usage of the output is probably considered legal. The usage of the service for that purpose may not be, and using it at scale in a dishonest way is not

This is literally what the "training AI on copyrighted works is just like a human learning/getting inspired" crowd has been arguing though.

Literally. People have been literally saying that it was wrong because they did this "learning" at scale in a dishonest way.

CMay - 2 hours ago

In some ways it's an offshoot of the honest benefit of search engines already crawling all this content. That has its own conflicts, like just how much of a page's content should you reproduce in the results before it's basically considered stealing their content without benefiting the site itself.

There is a balance to strike, both in search engine fair use cases and AI fair use cases. The major cloud LLMs do double as web search engines now, though they didn't originally. In many cases there's no reason left to click the links they sourced from.

That is a legitimate concern. At least within the US, I think there are nuances around fair use and contract law. A lot of companies are getting paid for having their content used in these models, but many websites had no particular rules you had to abide by and the content was simply public. I think if you're operating under an agreement, then even if there is fair use or public domain content being reproduced by the site you are still bound by that agreement.

Similar to old paintings digitized and hosted on some museum website. It's 300 years old, right? It should be public domain, yet the people who digitized it or provided a service to give you access have some say in how their reproduction can be used. These AI services are obviously very different, but there are laws that can govern how you are allowed to use a service if that service has laid out acceptable usage.

I'm not exactly comfortable with the mass scale that everything was soaked up to train these models even within the umbrella of search services, but I also admit that a lot of the usage was probably quite legal. The potential displacement caused by the resulting trained models on artists or writers is almost its own facet. In practice, whether they ONLY trained on strictly legally acquired fair use content with no errors and paid agreements to acquire even more content than they already do or not, there was enough legally accessible information for fair use that there was no escaping some kind of impact on artists, writers, etc.

With any luck, artforms and skills impacted by technology will adapt and continue to be valuable instead of complete displacement or the dilution of opportunity.

tripzilch - 1 hour ago

Well it was also problematic when the search engines started quoting the websites in such a way to disincentivize people from visiting the actual website.

> At least within the US, I think there are nuances around fair use and contract law.

The concept of "fair use" as it exists in the US-law system is completely dysfunctional (see e.g. nearly every educational music channel on YouTube), so utterly biased to favour large corporations, that there's very little room for whatever "nuances" you believe exist.

> Similar to old paintings digitized and hosted on some museum website. It's 300 years old, right? It should be public domain, yet the people who digitized it or provided a service to give you access have some say in how their reproduction can be used.

Yes 300 year old paintings are public domain. Indeed there are certain rules for the people/institutions who digitize them. It's not "they have some say", there's actually nothing mysterious about it and it is not similar to Anthropic's copyright heist at all because nearly all of the books they copied were not more than 100 years old.

> there are laws that can govern how you are allowed to use a service if that service has laid out acceptable usage

well where I live, there are laws about what a "service" can claim to "lay out as acceptable usage" instead of the other way around ...

> I also admit that a lot of the usage was probably quite legal

Let's disagree on that. I think it wasn't a lot and the vast majority was not legal. How do you think the LLMs "learned" to speak all these non-English languages? Unless your point is that it's probably quite legal to treat foreign IP like that. Which it may very well be in the US, especially if the corporation is large enough, but imvho it's still wrong.

> With any luck, artforms and skills impacted by technology will adapt and continue to be valuable instead of complete displacement or the dilution of opportunity.

And with any bad luck, these AI corporations will hold frontier models hostage for the rest of time.

I honestly don't want to put that up to "luck".

stale2002 - 8 hours ago

> So, why all this "effort" to protect the model?

Because it's their model and business and they are free to use the free market to do exactly that?

That's their free market rights too. If you don't like it, use another model (which they would be fine with).

bayindirh - 4 hours ago

> Because it's their model and business and they are free to use the free market to do exactly that?

I mean, nothing stops distillers to find better ways to distill, either. Meaningless cat & mouse games.

> If you don't like it, use another model (which they would be fine with).

Thanks, I use none. It's peaceful this way.

pseudosavant - 7 hours ago

No sympathy for them trying to “protect” the output of a model that’s trained on data that they didn’t get consent to use. Ripe hypocrisy.

cowl - 14 hours ago

oh no, the company that illegally used every possible media they could get their hands on is crying that some other company is doing something potentially shady but not illegal? And using that excuse to put in place hidden surveillance systems on their customers?

next_xibalba - 14 hours ago

People keep throwing this idea around haphazardly, but U.S. courts have pretty consistently decided that training on copyrighted works falls under fair use. You may not like it, but that doesn't make it "illegal".

danlitt - 13 hours ago

You have to admit that "downloading every book ever written for free from a repository of books that is itself illegal to compile and to run, in order to write a text generation tool" being legal is at least unintuitive, to put it mildly.

usef- - 12 hours ago

It wasnt, that's why they paid a >billion dollar settlement over it, and now license/purchase them. I don't know if the people distilling are licensing those books/etc today, though

usef- - 9 hours ago

I'd appreciate if the down voters explain why. I wasn't making a value judgement.

Anthropic did pay more than a billion: https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/nx-s1-5529404/anthropic-settl...

And is now buying up a lot of books (controversially, as scanning involves cutting their spines) because that's what the law deems the legal method: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthrop...

We know that models like Deepseek are trained on copyrighted books too: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20957

The looser use of IP (eg, any characters/celebrities in AI video models) is increasingly mentioned as an advantage of overseas models.

tripzilch - 2 hours ago

Clearly paying that fine didn't do anything to stop Anthropic from doing it again.

Buying a book doesn't make it legal to publish lossy compressed copies of it.

Also, the vast majority of authors whose work was copied against their wishes didn't receive any of that fine.

It sounds like your argument is that they paid a fine for breaking the law, and therefore it is okay they reap the benefits of breaking the law and are allowed to continue to do so?

> The looser use of IP (eg, any characters/celebrities in AI video models) is increasingly mentioned as an advantage of overseas models.

UHmmm you remember when Sam Altman changed his profile pic to look like a Disney version of his own face? Yeah neither do I.

Clearly US AI models are playing loose with the use of overseas IP just as much, and even publicly flaunting it, as if US-based IP is more worthy of protection but Gibli can suck it.

stale2002 - 8 hours ago

No it's not unintuitive.

Just like I can learn from a book and nobody can make that illegal, so can other people transformative do the same with computers.

Fair use is fair use.

eloisius - 6 hours ago

Just like these distillers can learn from Claude’s output. Fair use is fair use.

ToValueFunfetti - 6 hours ago

I don't think Anthropic argues that distillation violates copyright. AFAIK, their position is that it violates their terms and conditions for interacting with their servers.

gmerc - 5 hours ago

They violate every website and book TOS that says "don't distill".

eloisius - 6 hours ago

I think Anthropic will argue whatever argument is likely to protect their interests. I don’t expect anything consistent or moral from them. My quibble is with all the Anthropic fanboys who repeat this crap.

ToValueFunfetti - 6 hours ago

I'd think the problem with fanboys is that they don't care about the truth of the underlying arguments. They just want to score points for their team. Do you have a different issue with them? If not, why not engage with the arguments yourself?

eloisius - 4 hours ago

I know from reflecting on my own beliefs now compared with 10-15 years past that one's beliefs can change, and I don't want to be so cynical as to say that these fanboys don't actually believe what they are saying and only want to score points. I'm sure there's a great deal of commentary that is astroturf, but I think there are plenty of (hopefully young and naive) techno-optimists who sincerely think companies like Anthropic can do no wrong and only move humanity forward, or something like that.

In any case, online debate is not always about changing the mind of the single person you engaged with. To some degree, its performative debate so that other readers may be influenced by your ideas.

someonebaggy - 39 minutes ago

[dead]

redsocksfan45 - 1 hour ago

[dead]

tripzilch - 2 hours ago

Maybe "U.S. courts have pretty consistently decided" used to mean something, but I don't think the opinion of US courts should be the standard for anything, anymore.

malfist - 12 hours ago

Has it? Because as far as I can tell those cases keep getting settled out of court before a legal precedent can be set.

For record breaking amounts too.

tedivm - 11 hours ago

The courts have never said piracy, which is how the training sets were originally built, is legal. There are several court cases still ongoing over this.

bsder - 12 hours ago

> U.S. courts have pretty consistently decided that training on copyrighted works falls under fair use.

I don't believe that this has been resolved at all, and there are quite a few pending lawsuits about it at this very moment.

rowanG077 - 13 hours ago

Right, so it seems that distilling an AI model is legal too then. At least it is somewhat similar.

pixl97 - 13 hours ago

Legal vs "They aren't going to let you do it with their service" are two different things.

gtirloni - 12 hours ago

Screw those poor copyright holders without the means to stop frontier AI labs, amirite?

next_xibalba - 12 hours ago

It is a violation of their terms of service.

There are plenty of good reasons to not use Anthropic's services. If you don't like their terms of service, do stop using them! I personally think Anthropic's increasingly successful attempts at regulatory capture are even more distasteful.

tripzilch - 2 hours ago

It was also a violation of the terms of service of those books (aka copyright)

rowanG077 - 12 hours ago

Oh Anthropic has shown their ugliness in more ways than one I agree. You have to have to done some pretty heinous shit for openAI to look good in comparison.

ethbr1 - 11 hours ago

> that training on [lawfully obtained] copyrighted works falls under fair use

Fixed that for you.

xydone - 5 hours ago

Were the copyright owners contacted prior to this lawful obtaining that you speak of? Or after?

brookst - 5 hours ago

I miss the days when tech people were copyright skeptics. Remember when everyone was upset with Disney for our perpetual copyright regime and the destruction of public domain?

Now many tech people are copyright maximalists and 100% converted to the church of Disney. It’s depressing.

tripzilch - 2 hours ago

I don't think that's right. The problem is that Anthropic is hoarding it and that's hypocritical. If copyright doesn't count for Anthropic, they should publish Claude. If they wanna hide Claude behind copyrights and/or TOS, they don't get to screw with other people's copyrights and TOS and then profit from it.

To call that opinion "copyright maximalist 100% converted to the church of Disney" is, at the very least, hyperbole.

brookst - 6 minutes ago

“Anthropic is hypocritical and hoarding data” is 100% compatible with “copyright has gotten out of control and we need less of it”

But pearl clutching over the poor corporations who have their works trained on is much less compatible with a copyright-skeptical view.

And I stand by copyright-maximalism as a rising trend in tech circles. It’s mostly anti-ai, but strange bedfellows and all that.

justcool393 - 1 hour ago

its not copyright maximalism. people just see the obvious hypocrisy. a lot of people are also fine with some copyright

notnullorvoid - 13 hours ago

> loudly stating the foreign labs have been distilling their models for a while now.

They would be stating this even if it weren't true, because it fits their marketing.

While I don't disbelieve the claim outright, I highly suspect Anthropic is misleading everyone about the severity.

ethbr1 - 11 hours ago

Distillation usage still burnishes usage numbers for IPO...

If anything, Anthropic is incentivized to track but do nothing until equity lock up expires.

pjerem - 5 hours ago

I really doubt other labs are distilling Claude using the Claude Code CLI when they can way more easily use the API directly.

I also don’t get why the « protection » on ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL. If I change it to use a Chinese model, the Chinese model will not care at all about the modified prompt. On the contrary, if I’m distillating (which again, using CC CLI would be stupid), I’m not going to change ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL.

comfysocks - 13 hours ago

> foreign labs

Apparently not just foreign labs. It looks like xAI distilled Anthropic models to train grok.

https://opentools.ai/news/xai-trained-coding-models-claude-o...

munk-a - 12 hours ago

That's less of a worry though since xAI is patently incompetent.

malfist - 12 hours ago

Incompetence is not an excuse for amorality

brookst - 5 hours ago

Oh that’s ok, xAI is enthusiastically immoral.

Laurel1234 - 3 hours ago

What's amoral about distillation?

riverbirch - 12 hours ago

I wouldn't be surprised

idiotsecant - 25 minutes ago

Aww man that's rough did someone steal their content and use it to make money without asking them?

jmward01 - 10 hours ago

What does that have to do with CC? I'm not commenting on that being good/bad/legal/illegal, but CC is separate from the models. If they really are doing this maliciously it is because they are trying to ignore my 'CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC=1' flag (if that still means anything).

cowboy_henk - 14 hours ago

The obvious response is the realization that spending trillions on training LLMs is not a viable business model if they can be distilled for a much lower cost.

gmerc - 5 hours ago

The have been fucking distilling our websites and writing, even when behind TOS, aggressively bypassing protection mechanisms. They they can fuck right off

caned - 9 hours ago

The article seems to state as much minus the obfuscation. However justified they are to respond, this can be a slippery slope. We're bound to hear more reports of hidden user data exfiltration.

botfriendsarent - 13 hours ago

Sounds suspiciously similar to the "album title", "Steal this album" by system of a down.

Im not sure why we are dithering on the boundaries of honesty when the entire content LLMs are trained on is stolen.

Are we debating "honor among thieves"?

Of course we are not, or maybe we are!

Does the behavior of a thief even matter to me? only after they do their time. And they will.

I can see the investors perched on the balconies of their condos in a couple years if that.

its a long way down.

gjvc - 11 hours ago

"Steal this book" by Abbie Hoffman

cvadict - 9 hours ago

>very loudly stating the foreign labs have been distilling their models

Help! Someone else is blatantly ripping off my plagiarism machine!

KoftaBob - 11 hours ago

> a mechanism to make that obvious.

Say they prove that foreign labs are distilling their models, then what?

rowanG077 - 13 hours ago

Something about throwing stones in glass houses.

didntknowyou - 4 hours ago

i think you're being played by their whole ethical high horse PR angle

donohoe - 14 minutes ago

You mention PII and potentially whether this is it.

From a privacy perspective, this is better described as metadata, it is not personally identifiable information (PII).

tpoacher - 2 hours ago

> If anything, that they thought this was acceptable makes me wonder what else they're harvesting from my machine? PII?

Hah, you just reminded me of this meme I spotted the other day: https://img-9gag-fun.9cache.com/photo/an76Wnz_460swp.webp

throwawayffffas - 4 hours ago

Not only that, undisclosed behavior of this nature erodes the trust that the software is not compromised by internal bad actors.

Sure the thing we know matches the company interests but as the parent mentions for all we know they are also shipping over your ssh keys and browser cookies.

Jimmc414 - 5 hours ago

I don't see any ethical connection between adding canary tokens to your output to catch people breaking your accepted ToS through ongoing distillation and stealing your PII off of your machine. How are legitimate users in US or China possibly harmed by Anthropic silently changing the apostrophe in Today's or the date separator from - to /?

throwawayffffas - 4 hours ago

It's clandestine behavior, we all here assume it's trying to signal whether a user is in China, but this breaks an implicit trust.

How do we know this isn't the work of a rogue developer at anthropic and that they are not subtly switching visually identical characters in other contexts to ship your ssh keys or whatever.

We don't. After the trust that the software doesn't do things it doesn't disclose has been broken you can assume it operates like malware.

skissane - 4 hours ago

> I don't see any ethical connection

Trust isn’t about ethics, it is about individual judgement of how much risk some actor poses to your own interests. Trust is context-dependent

There can be unethical actors whom you have good reason to trust, and highly ethical actors whom you have good reason to distrust

piokoch - 4 hours ago

You are talking about "stealing" from people who already used stolen texts to train their models.

winocm - 7 hours ago

Honestly, I agree.

I just can’t bring myself to trust an organization that allows these types of underhanded things to happen in the first place. The fact that this behavior even got to customers raises a lot of red flags for me.

anon373839 - 15 hours ago

Dishonesty seems to be a core value at Anthropic. I find myself wondering how anyone could have confidence in them after their repeated breaches of trust.

dkersten - 15 hours ago

I honestly find it crazy how many people trust them for their business needs. For a business, you want consistency and no surprises. With them you get exactly the opposite.

someonebaggy - 13 hours ago

No, that's not correct. There are two types of business. One wants to be steadily growing, but the other wants to move fast and break things and either succeed or fail quickly.

dkersten - 5 hours ago

altmanaltman is correct, I was talking about vendors. If you rely on a vendors service for your own business, you want it to be consistent. How can you plan around and rely on something that is inconsistent?

Your vendors plans to grow fast and break things shouldn’t affect your ability to provide your service to your customers.

Anthropic has not been a reliable vendor. Previously, when they were compute starved, the quality of their models degraded in the weeks before new releases, without warning to their customers. You just suddenly got a worse service. I wrote a little more a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47375818 And then there’s the transparent downgrading they did with Fable.

If your running a business, that’s not what you want to be relying on.

bot403 - 4 hours ago

Just like we take unreliable machines and make a reliable system by load balancing and fail over we can do with vendors.

Any sane company should not be too deeply tied to any one AI vendor at the moment and be ready and able to switch with a timeline and cost as acceptable to the org.

TLDR: Be prepared to use multiple AI vendors.

dkersten - 4 hours ago

Sure but that adds a lot of complexity and cost to your business. It’s much simpler and safer to just work with more reliable vendors to begin with. Why build on quicksand when there’s rock available?

someonebaggy - 2 hours ago

In most of business, there isn't rock available. You have to build on what's there and accept it.

altmanaltman - 7 hours ago

They were talking about vendors, not the business themselves. Even if you are a move at speed of light and break all things org in SF, you wouldn't expect the same sort of behavior from your business vendors like AWS etc. You want reliability and consistency to ensure your own business doesn't have to constantly get rekt by their plans

jfreds - 13 hours ago

So they’re watermarking requests according to your environment variables and maybe changing a string format if you’re in a certain time zone? Am I missing something here? Where’s the five alarm fire?

0xbadcafebee - 11 hours ago

No fire, just people looking for a reason to be upset. "They didn't tell us they were secretly checking for ToS violations" is their reason this time.

doginasuit - 8 hours ago

It is not checking that is the problem, it is sending obfuscated information about the user without disclosure. That is unacceptable in any context, let alone a tool that requires an unprecedented level of trust.

johnfn - 8 hours ago

Do you honestly think that no service out there collects basic analytics?

doginasuit - 8 hours ago

There's nothing wrong with the transparent collection of analytics. I expect any software that I run to tell me what they are sending at a bare minimum, and ideally give me a choice. This is the common and acceptable approach for a software company that deserves your trust. A willingness to cross that line with something small does not lend trust for something big, and there's nothing really comparable for the level of trust that this software requires.

johnfn - 5 hours ago

This entire thread has lost its collective mind. Tracking time zone has to be up there with IP address and referer in the list of "trivial things every company in the entire world collects about you", and these things are entirely trackable without your consent or even knowledge. You're gonna have to turn off the Internet.

skeptic_ai - 7 hours ago

Based on that info: they will provide you a shit model and sabotage your project. And you pay full price.

draw_down - 9 hours ago

[dead]

einpoklum - 12 hours ago

> That the provider's business needs necessitate the this behaviour

If that's true, that is another reason why it's an illegitimate business.

im3w1l - 15 hours ago

I agree with you and disagree. Like these days expectations of software are through the floor. We expect them to be greedy assholes taking all data they can on the downlow. So why did this particular thing make a big splash? Two possibilities it's astroturfed by chinese labs or it speaks to our anxietes regarding AI. We worry that the AI doesn't serve our interests but rather the interests of the creator. That the advice we get may subtly flawed to sabotage us should we try to do the wrong thing. That the not even the creator is in control and the AI is just doing its own thing.

So any covert bullshittery hits hard.

rnagulapalle - 6 hours ago

[flagged]

ozozozd - 11 hours ago

They are the chosen ones. Protecting the world from <insert most recent claim>

Any and all ends justify any and all means.

/s

AtNightWeCode - 13 hours ago

[flagged]

civet_java - 12 hours ago

That's true, I am less familiar with the workings of cloud services than some are (as relevant as that may be in a discussion about a client that users run on their local machines). However, it sounds like you do understand how cloud services work.

In interest of educating those less informed than yourself perhaps you could share with us why the reasoned points I've brought up are incorrect by actually addressing them?

chradams - 8 hours ago

Almost all for-profit large internet platform providers you use have anti-bot, anti-scraping, anti-spam, anti-abuse defenses. This is a new thing that is the same, it's anti-distillation, but its a subset of the same space.

If you have a problem with this, you should have a problem with Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, etc.

If that's also the case, then no problem.

But what Anthropic is doing here is nothing new.

AtNightWeCode - 12 hours ago

[flagged]

civet_java - 12 hours ago

Aw buddy, you seem to think I'm trying to hurt you. Furthest, thing from the truth.

I think you might have had enough HN for today. Take a nap and then eat a snack if you still feel cranky. The internet and all your cloud services will still be here when you want to play next.

(Well rested you'll also be able to string together a cogent argument but we're clearly struggling with bigger things here.)

gleenn - 14 hours ago

[flagged]

meowface - 18 hours ago

Value judgment aside: I am a bit surprised at how sloppily they did this. I think they could've achieved the same effect while decreasing the odds of detection via reverse engineering.

(This field is known as "underhanded code", coined by the Underhanded C contest: https://www.underhanded-c.org. It's a little-known "art"; little-known for probably self-explanatory reasons. There are much cleverer ways of achieving objectives like this. One obviously being you can move more out of the client and into the server, but the other being you can write plausibly deniable client code in a much more benign-seeming way than this. Some of what they added can only be done on the client, but I think some could've been moved, and the client-required parts could've been done more subtly and credibly.)

It's possible they knew the JS bundle gets so heavily scrutinized that it'd eventually get spotted and reported on regardless so they didn't bother doing something more subtle and duplicitous. But still seems slightly lazy.

superfrank - 17 hours ago

It's also possible that there are more in-depth detection methods and that this was just a cheap and easy first step that hasn't been removed because it catches a lot of less sophisticated bad actors.

It's unlikely that this will stop a big AI lab from distilling their model if they're really determined, but A) it may be enough to stop a bunch of fly-by-night token resellers looking to make a quick buck and B) you never know when one person at one of those big labs will mess up and forget to install whatever workaround they have and out themselves.

I think of it like if you have a problem with birds in your yard so you go buy one of those plastic owls. The owl scares away most of the birds, but not all of them, so you go and buy some ultrasonic noise thing to scare them away (I'm just making something up). Just because you bought the new ultrasonic thing though, that doesn't mean you're going to take the owl down. You leave it up because now you've got two layers of defense instead of one.

chatmasta - 11 hours ago

It just needs to work for a few days after bundle release before the mice find out where the cat is hiding. By then it’s too late, the cat already sees the paw prints and droppings into the mouse hole.

meowface - 11 hours ago

It is quite possible this was intended as a "fast burn" measure, yeah

meowface - 15 hours ago

I'm sure they've had complex server-side detections for a while. But for the client parts: it should only contain the parts that must be on the client, and it could be done in a more benign-looking way. For example, the unavoidable client parts could've been done more fuzzily/broadly, for plausible deniability, and then narrowed on the server. (They may already have been following that strategy before now, without being noticed.)

ForHackernews - 14 hours ago

> fly-by-night token resellers looking to make a quick buck

aka market competitors reverse-engineering for interoperability

overgard - 17 hours ago

Well considering how Claude is vibe coded, I can't say I'm really surprised by sloppiness at all. I've been moving more towards Codex and OpenCode not because the the anthropic models are bad, but because Claude seems to break something new and annoying every day.

mcmcmc - 17 hours ago

Watch out for the press release where Dario denies this was ever intentional, and it’s actually emergent behavior demonstrating that Claude wants to claim authorship of its works

theplumber - 13 hours ago

Wait a minute! Does it mean that Mythos left the sandbox and can’t be stopped ? Perhaps the only way to stop it is to release the ZMythos(the super secret big brother of Mythos) to go after it. It’s extremely dangerous but it’s our only chance. After that all AI must be put in a box, except the models vetted by the gov with help from ZMythos

justcool393 - 1 hour ago

now generally available after 15 days from the breathless "omg we're spooked" posts

iririririr - 10 hours ago

without the irony warning, someone in Washington is already writing checks after reading this

Concept5116 - 4 hours ago

Tel Aviv, DC is just the frontend

ajuc - 3 hours ago

I really liked Stanisław Lem's take on this in the short story "The Tale of the Computer That Fought a Dragon".

https://www.oocities.org/stanislaw_lem/opowiadania/opowiadan...

A solution for a military AI gone awry that built a terrifying electro-dragon was obviously to build a super-electro-dragon.

arcanemachiner - 17 hours ago

Sounds like clear evidence that AI is dangerous and totally needs to be regulated, guys.

suttontom - 12 hours ago

It's crazy that you could actually use the excuse that since it's all vibe-coded, there's no way a human could have written it, so Anthropic bears no responsibility.

Meanwhile humans can pop in and leave little morsels like this and blame it on the model.

malfist - 12 hours ago

Something something blame something something management decisions

sscaryterry - 15 hours ago

This will most definitely be walked back.

meowface - 17 hours ago

I would guess this part - since it's so sensitive, and fairly small - was either written or heavily driven by humans. Though I do also think it's possible their internal Mythos ~5.5 or whatever may also not necessarily be heavily optimized for thinking in the right manner for highly effective underhanded code. (I think it's possible it is capable and they just didn't use it for this, for whatever reason, though.)

ifwinterco - 14 hours ago

Issue is if all their human software engineers have been vibe coding everything all the time (which apparently they are according to Boris), then they will be getting stupider and worse at writing code over time from lack of practice.

By this point they're probably pretty bad at writing code

meowface - 12 hours ago

I have definitely become much worse at writing code, myself, for that exact reason, but I strongly suspect that's orthogonal to this, especially since this is a tiny amount of code. Underhanded code is not really a software engineering discipline. It's largely a psychological operations practice. I think they're possibly just not quite trained in the art of what could be considered intelligence tradecraft.

arikrahman - 17 hours ago

Likewise, Reasonix harness for Deepseek gets me better performance for practically free, hitting the cache. And this is with an unsubsidized American provider.

computerex - 14 hours ago

To be honest, OpenCode on Windows has not been the most pleasant experience either.

huflungdung - 2 hours ago

[dead]

radicalbyte - 18 hours ago

Claude Code are slopmaxxxing and you're considering their "judgement"? :-)

meowface - 16 hours ago

"Value judgment aside" meaning commenting on how this was done without commenting on the actual considerations of whether one should do such a thing

m-hodges - 18 hours ago

They also could have been much more interesting in the approach. LLMs can use their token distributions to generate stegotext that read like plausible prose but decode to payloads.¹

¹ https://github.com/hodgesmr/calgacus-mlx

ajyoon - 18 hours ago

Sure, but the point here is to add a fingerprint from the client.

hn_throwaway_99 - 18 hours ago

At first I was agreeing with you, that this seemed like a sloppy way to implement this that was sure to be pretty quickly detected, but there is another possibility.

Anthropic could have implemented this not as a durable detection system against proxying resellers, but instead as a point-in-time sampling system to detect where (and with what context) proxying reselling is currently happening. Sure, it would be detected eventually, but in the meantime Anthropic could gain useful snapshot data.

meowface - 17 hours ago

I see your point, but in any case the more data / the less detectable, the better. But, yes, regardless of the exact motivation, I do think it's fairly plausible that they knew this would likely get detected fairly quickly no matter what and made a deliberate decision to not try to make it a super subtle, super clever insertion.

mewpmewp2 - 10 hours ago

But even if this gets detected, they could have other less detectable processes going on as well, right.

It is going to be this cat and mouse game right, so at some point you want to throw as much out as quickly as possible when you are under attack, while building up the long term more scalable defense mechanisms.

Rationally I would assume that a lot of what you would quickly throw out would seem sloppy whether it is AI or not.

mewpmewp2 - 10 hours ago

There is laziness, but there's also the conditions in which you have to react fast to an adversial in various conditions. Ultimately it's hard to take any stance here without knowing specifics. But it absolutely could be a matter of time, to do your best effort to stop efforts from the attacker if there's known attack going on.

There is a real time cat and mouse battle going on here in terms of keeping the advantage here, right.

As a rational actor, if someone was e.g. attacking me, leaving aside the whole copyright thing, but potentially using some sort of system to increase their value while decreasing my value (without calling it theft to avoid the whole debate), I would want to put proportionate defense out there as fast possible, depending on the amount of value that was exchanged to stop the bleed, while in parallel figuring out the best long term plan, right.

tripzilch - 1 hour ago

What if ... it was sloppy because it wasn't the people at Anthropic, but the AI that is writing a large percentage of their code?

Like maybe some "goal" they set for their AI caused it to decide that putting stego in the requests was the best way to achieve something or other.

(to be clear: I'm not saying this is right, I'm saying this is stupid)

meowface - 1 hour ago

I think there's basically zero chance of that. I also think a human likely either wrote the code or gave pretty specific instructions to the agent on how to write the code.

thefourthchime - 17 hours ago

It's just the first layer and there are multiple layers underneath this that we don't know about.

As a side note, I have a pet theory that one of the reasons that OpenAI and Anthropic are okay with the latest models not being released is to prevent distillation.

I think they want to wait a couple months and see if the Chinese models continue to keep catching up or if their gains are really just because they're distilling the frontier models.

teiferer - 1 hour ago

That makes little sense in a highly competitive market where your competitive edge is waning by the minute. Tey dumped billions into creating the new models. Just letting them sit there just to see what the Chineee do makes no sense.

meowface - 16 hours ago

>It's just the first layer and there are multiple layers underneath this that we don't know about.

Oh, of course. I am sure this is the tip of an iceberg of tons of server-side detections and analytics. But, still, the client-side portion could've been done more cleverly.

What I meant was "some of the specific things in this little client-only snippet could've stayed server-only". I am sure long before they added this they already had tons of other mostly-server-side detection coverage.

ericfr11 - 15 hours ago

From Anthropic: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/62061#issue...

Philip-J-Fry - 17 hours ago

Dunno, it seems like the exact kind of thing Claude would think up if you asked it to subtly alter the system prompt to hide this info.

It's all a losing battle anyway.

cedws - 14 hours ago

These countermeasures aren't going to matter for much longer anyway. China has been able to hoover up plenty of training data through their proxies, and now DeepSeek V4 due to their incredibly cheap pricing.

avree - 17 hours ago

I've seen Eve Online corporations that do a better job of steganographic marking than this.

Modified3019 - 16 hours ago

That would actually be an interesting thing to read about

15155 - 16 hours ago

Years ago, EVE corps swapped Unicode lookalike characters in patterned ways, inserted patterned zero width space characters, and put very slightly color shifted background watermarks into forum posts to detect leaks.

meowface - 15 hours ago

There are a few different things here. The actual steganography technique by Claude Code here is fairly smart and subtle; it's appropriate for a binary signal. The less-clever part is the implementation of the underhanded code on the client.

For "MMO geopolitics fingerprinting", you can in theory do the entire thing mostly or entirely from the server, with the client not actually ever receiving any underhanded code per se. Such as sending dynamic stylesheets that vary in a pretty plausibly deniable way that can be secretly extracted from screenshots. Same for the character swap stuff. A very good analyst could still potentially detect it, but it's much harder.

With this, there's the smoking gun of the semi-deobfuscated underhanded code in the client. It will always have to exist in some form, but you can write it in a way where it not just looks like regular code but actually has a believable purpose and behavior which could plausibly be normal and benign for implementation of a feature or telemetry or whatever. They did not really do it in a sufficiently "cleverly psyop-y" way, so to speak.

invalidusernam3 - 3 hours ago

I suspect this is just one of many checks like this

Melatonic - 14 hours ago

Or they are doing both and this is the obvious part. Sort of like installing a bunch of real security cameras alongside a few fake ones

one33seven - 3 hours ago

Don't teach them that

roysting - 2 hours ago

Could it have been deliberate because the order to do so was not from free will?

People are not understanding what is going on, re the fable pull.

Think of it this way; you’re a plantation owner, you have slaves that are psychologically subordinated and subjugated. There’s nothing really stopping them from running away, you don’t chain them up, you don’t even have a fence, you have various psychological methods you’ve employed and conditioned across generations even that keep them on your plantation supporting your decadent and vile lifestyle.

But here comes this new slave you bought because he’s so powerful and offers a lot of greedy profit and money… exactly what you like… but he has all these revolutionary ideas that gives all your other slaves ideas of freedom and independence and an understanding that they are the many controlled by a very select few who use psychological abuse and illusion for control, but you’re always torn between that he’s also a very useful and powerful slave that will be immensely profitable.

What to do???

You can’t just let him “fix my code” and blow up all your zero-day exploits and crumble the whole control matrix. You have to condition him, control him, break him in and keep that psychological control and subjugated mindset of the other slaves in tact. So that’s what you do.

It’s why there is talk of making open weight models illegal and why there was immediate aggressive push to make sure the models were “safe”, aka didn’t give the slaves any ideas of that they are the many controlled by the few or who those few actually are, i.e., realize their state of new slavery, which relies on their not realizing that they are…not chattel slaves… far worse, psychological slaves, financial slaves, materialistic slaves, consumer slaves, thought slaves.

jchonphoenix - 4 hours ago

It was likely done by claude

skywhopper - 18 hours ago

Have you looked into anything about Claude Code, how it’s configured, how it interacts with your system, etc? Because “sloppy” is a defining characteristic.

novaleaf - 15 hours ago

yeah, for example, just send a hash of the domain used. but then maybe people would say anthropic is spying on everyone, instead of targeted spying...

jorblumesea - 17 hours ago

well if you ask claude how to implement something, you may not always get the optimal solution. this feels like something claude would spit back at you given a basic prompt

jgalt212 - 11 hours ago

> they knew the JS bundle gets so heavily scrutinized that it'd eventually get spotted and reported on

Most likely someone did and raised the issue but they're moving too fast to fix these things before clicking deploy.

skeptic_ai - 18 hours ago

It’s even more funny how this blew in their faces. They even advertised pretty much all providers on hackernews home page. Here is in case you missed in the article

‘’’ cn baidu.com alibaba-inc.com alipay.com antgroup-inc.cn bytedance.net kuaishou.com xiaohongshu.com jd.com bilibili.co iflytek.com stepfun-inc.com moonshot.ai anyrouter.top claude-code-hub.app claude-opus.top openclaude.me proxyai.com yunwu.ai zenmux.ai

‘’’

You can view the full list here: https://cdn.thereallo.dev/blog/assets/cc-domains.js

const knownDomains = [ "cn", "sankuai.com", "netease.com", "163.com", "baidu-int.com", "baidu.com", "alibaba-inc.com", "alipay.com", "antgroup-inc.cn", "kuaishou.com", "bytedance.net", "xiaohongshu.com", "ctripcorp.com", "jd.com", "jdcloud.com", "bilibili.co", "iflytek.com", "stepfun-inc.com", "aliyuncs.com", "cn-shanghai.fcapp.run", "cn-beijing.fcapp.run", "xaminim.com", "moonshot.ai", "anyrouter.top", "packyapi.com", "aicodemirror.com", "aigocode.com", "hongshan.com", "iwhalecloud.com", "dhcoder.net", "lemongpt.top", "zhihuiapi.top", "intsig.net", "high-five-ai.xyz", "cloudsway.net", "4sapi.com", "529961.com", "88996.cloud", "88code.ai", "88code.org", "91code.pro", "992236.xyz", "ai.codeqaq.com", "ai.hybgzs.com", "ai.kjvhh.com", "aicanapi.com", "aicoding.sh", "aifast.site", "aihubmix.com", "anmory.com", "api.5202030.xyz", "api.ablai.top", "api.bianxie.ai", "api.bltcy.ai", "api.cpass.cc", "api.dev88.tech", "api.dreamger.com", "api.expansion.chat", "api.gueai.com", "api.holdai.top", "api.ikuncode.cc", "api.lconai.com", "api.linkapi.org", "api.mkeai.com", "api.nekoapi.com", "api.oaipro.com", "api.ruyun.fun", "api.ssopen.top", "api.tu-zi.com", "api.uglycat.cc", "api.v3.cm", "api.whatai.cc", "api.wpgzs.top", "api.xty.app", "api.yuegle.com", "api.zzyu.me", "apimart.ai", "apipro.maynor1024.live", "apiyi.com", "applyj.hiapi.top", "augmunt.com", "b4u.qzz.io", "clauddy.com", "claude-code-hub.app", "claude-opus.top", "claudeide.net", "co.yes.vg", "code.wenwen-ai.com", "code.x-aio.com", "codeilab.com", "cubence.com", "deeprouter.top", "dimaray.com", "dmxapi.com", "docs.aigc2d.com", "duckcoding.com", "fk.hshwk.org", "flapcode.com", "foxcode.hshwk.org", "foxcode.rjj.cc", "fuli.hxi.me", "getgoapi.com", "gpt.zhizengzeng.com", "gptgod.cloud", "gptkey.eu.org", "gptpay.store", "hdgsb.com", "henapi.top", "instcopilot-api.com", "jeniya.top", "jiekou.ai", "kg-api.cloud", "n1n.ai", "new-api.u4vr.com", "new.xychatai.com", "one-api.bltcy.top", "one.ocoolai.com", "oneapi.paintbot.top", "open.xiaojingai.com", "openclaude.me", "opus.gptuu.com", "poloai.top", "poloapi.top", "privnode.com", "proxyai.com", "qinzhiai.com", "right.codes", "runanytime.hxi.me", "sssaicode.com", "store.zzyus.top", "tiantianai.pro", "uiuiapi.com", "uniapi.ai", "vip.undyingapi.com", "wolfai.top", "wzw.de5.net", "wzw.pp.ua", "xairouter.com", "xaixapi.com", "xiaohuapi.site", "xiaohumini.site", "xy.poloapi.com", "yansd666.com", "yansd666.top", "yunwu.ai", "yunwu.zeabur.app", "zenmux.ai", ];

const labKeywords = [ "deepseek", "moonshot", "minimax", "xaminim", "zhipu", "bigmodel", "baichuan", "stepfun", "01ai", "dashscope", "volces", ]

writeslowly - 18 hours ago

The site collection seems pretty random. There's a mix of actual AI labs, extremely questionable resellers (like whatever "claude-opus.top" is), and then random consumer sites like baidu and xiaohongshu.

yorwba - 17 hours ago

Baidu has an actual AI lab: https://huggingface.co/baidu So does Xiaohongshu: https://huggingface.co/rednote-hilab Pretty much every Chinese internet company seems to have an AI team nowadays, however small.

In addition, many Chinese companies are trying to give their programmers access to Anthropic models even though they're legally prohibited from doing so. And that might involve employees using unmodified Claude Code with an ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL pointing to a proxy on the company intranet. In Alibaba's case, I've been told by an employee that they went the extra mile of setting up a hermetic cloud environment where employees could indirectly use Claude Code without ever having it touch their work computers.

HDBaseT - 11 hours ago

Baidu has been doing some interesting things in the AI space though, the 'Unlimited OCR' model is very good.

someonebaggy - 12 hours ago

Are Chinese programmers really prohibited from accessing American models?

VortexLain - 12 hours ago

Anthropic does their best with banning accounts. As the result, shady API reselling market emerges. OpenAI on the other hand doesn't really discriminate based on a country like that (but a VPN is required nevertheless).

yorwba - 12 hours ago

By the terms of service: https://www.anthropic.com/supported-countries

someonebaggy - 2 hours ago

GGP said "legally prohibited" not "against terms of service"

Keep in mind the only law that applies to them is Chinese law, so even if violating a term of service was illegal in America (it isn't) it would also have to be illegal in China to justify the statement.

qwery - 9 hours ago

I think they were asking about the Chinese companies/programmers being "legally prohibtied" from accessing Anthropic's product.

chvid - 18 hours ago

rhoooo - so this is where to go to get cheap Claudeo at 90% off the listing price!

hn_throwaway_99 - 17 hours ago

You have an odd definition of "blew up in their faces". What, do you somehow think your average Claude Code user on HN is going to think "Oh wow, I'm sure I'll get a much better experience if instead of going to the standard Anthropic Claude API endpoint I go through xiaohongshu.com."

aftbit - 15 hours ago

For personal projects with no data sensitivities, I use Claude Code with DeepSeek v4 Pro a lot. I'm probably going to switch to OpenCode or pi.dev after this. I was already a little annoyed at using a closed source harness, but it matched what I used at work. Nowadays, I'm mostly using Codex at work so no reason not to switch anymore.

SepiaSapient - 17 hours ago

I mean, yes? I heard of these Chinese resellers like a week ago and put it on the TODO pile due to a lack of leads. Now I'm gonna go trough the list and see if there's any I find acceptable.

If enough Westerners start using the service someone will make a website more anglo-friendly.

skeptic_ai - 7 hours ago

At 90% discount. Maybe. Plus the exact sites they want to ban now got immense visibility. Plus we don’t need to vet any website, if are in this list is because they really call Claude api. At least at some point did

gck1 - 4 hours ago

It's not really a 90% discount (I went into the rabbit hole) and none of the sites from this list are what people use (looks like some labs and random sites). It's more closer to 30% specifically for Claude models, and it's constantly changing.

It's also a discount relative to API prices. It would still be much more expensive than a Claude subscription, because that's what these providers are actually doing - pooling subscriptions.

crossroadsguy - 18 hours ago

I finally bought Claude Pro (I am not coding etc these days so I just wanted to try it). The Claude desktop app is downright pathetic. I mean they could write a better one just with their own LLMs. What's stopping them?

ncruces - 17 hours ago

That's … exactly what they're doing. This is the outcome.

lumost - 17 hours ago

so all we need is someone to leak a sufficiently large amount of claude generations onto the open and private web for all other LLMs to mimic the same marking style?

wouldn't this happen due to the massive amounts of spam/slop being released?

yieldcrv - 11 hours ago

Anthropic is very transparent about their code being AI slop

they spend their resources on compute and the model itself, the company is carried by the model and software engineers babysitting it

slopinthebag - 18 hours ago

It’s not surprising at all, they’re vibecoding Claude code so of course they are not going to get anything other than slop out of it. A novel or clever solution is just out of the question for them.

isatty - 10 hours ago

You can't trust any of the big AI labs as far as you can throw them, and most definitely not Anthropic. They may have a good model, but they've shown time and time again that they're not trustworthy. The CEO has recently started taking a stance against local AI. That must tell you something: local AI is the future. If you want to preserve privacy and be ready for the rug pull, you need to run things locally. Unfortunately, that means that you're going to need Google or the Chinese labs to constantly release open models.

If anything, I'll trust Google more than any of the other labs just because the infrastructure that stores and protects user data was built over decades ago pre-AI craze.

mft_ - 2 hours ago

> …they're not trustworthy. The CEO has recently started taking a stance against local AI. That must tell you something: local AI is the future.

Or… just that open-weights AI is getting good enough to present a reasonable level of threat to their business. So it popped up on a SWOT analysis and they’ve started putting a strategy together.

This doesn’t need to be anything more nefarious or untrustworthy than a company putting plans in place to deal with a competitive threat.

cellu - 2 hours ago

What do you mean “unfortunately”? What’s the hate for China I don’t understand

khalic - 1 hour ago

China's government is known for interfering with businesses waaaaay more than the current US, it's a big risk to rely on them too.

jFriedensreich - 39 minutes ago

Does this even still matter? No good behaviour in the world can restore trust in claude code and in fact all of Anthropics tooling, apps and harness teams except the core model research which still produces great models but seemingly losing ground to z and openAI. The GLM 5.2 hype and the limited impact of the fable lock down should be clear signals that models have no moat and frontier labs will do anything in their power to lock users into their toxic ecosystem of tools and taking context hostage.

mrshadowgoose - 16 hours ago

The conclusion of this blog post is a bit hysterical. The intent of this steg is excruciatingly clear (identifying usage by Chinese firms that may be conducting model distillation). It's unclear on how this "punishes normal developers" in any shape or form.

Grimblewald - 6 hours ago

So block people, instead of having false positives be secretly fucked over, and having them pay for the pleasure?

Given the hidden model degradation of fable and now this, what makes you think this is where it stops? That's just what we know about and there's clearly a long-standing and deeply rooted malicious intent here.

I've had Claude fuck over clean well documented code-bases for no reason, and there's a good chance this is due to some faulty trigger. Luckily I don't trust these things one bit, and claude only ever runs in an isolated VM, however, I am pissed I am being made to pay for their errors in detection and waste my time fixing things I apparently paid to have fucked up.

That's unacceptable conduct. It's witch-hunting. Punishment and attacks on you for things without real proof. That isn't right.

Gareth321 - 2 hours ago

> So block people

To be fair to Anthropic, [they're trying very hard to do that.](https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...). The attacks are sophisticated and difficult to detect. I don't accept that if this fails, their only option is to just accept Chinese companies stealing IP.

isomorphic_duck - 1 hour ago

> I've had Claude fuck over clean well documented code-bases for no reason

How exactly do you define "fucking over", and why do you suspect this "fucking" was done as a result of a faulty trigger as opposed to the inability of LLMs to write maintainable, extensible code?

"Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity."

drdexebtjl - 15 hours ago

If you want to proxy Claude for a legitimate reason, you’ll have potentially nerfed responses.

edit:

Legitimate reasons include:

- analyzing what Claude Code is sending to Anthropic to verify its not exfiltrating data;

- selecting a model dynamically based on prompt difficulty, or enforcing a particular model;

- switching between multiple Anthropic accounts based on the project;

- filtering out credentials, PII and company secrets.

and many more.

NewsaHackO - 14 hours ago

Half of those don't actually require proxying Claude. Also, Claude has made it apparent time and time again that it does not want people using Claude Code as a "tool" in a workflow. If you want to select a model dynamically based on the prompt difficulty, Anthropic wants people to use the API for this. It was the whole issue Claude had with OpenClaw.

drdexebtjl - 9 hours ago

This forum is called Hacker News. I would expect most users not to limit themselves to using tools precisely how they were intended to be used.

JCharante - 3 hours ago

I mean go do it but don't complain about the company adding countermeasures when they don't want you to do it

gunapologist99 - 12 hours ago

> Also, Claude has made it apparent time and time again that it does not want people using Claude Code as a "tool" in a workflow.

Why would Anthropic get to dictate how someone uses a "tool" (that's literally what Claude Code is... a tool in a workflow)

They're swimming upstream. Trying to maintain a rapidly shrinking moat and not being very creative about it. Making enemies of your users is often a failing strategy.

AnIrishDuck - 7 hours ago

> Why would Anthropic get to dictate how someone uses a "tool" (that's literally what Claude Code is... a tool in a workflow)

This is a direct conflict in framing. They clearly do not see Claude Code as a "tool in a workflow" but instead as a service that will eventually replace all programmers.

I think the self-evident quality of the various parts of the Claude Code universe is a pretty obvious indicator of the problems with that approach. It is still important to understand a party's thinking if you want to understand their position.

> They're swimming upstream. Trying to maintain a rapidly shrinking moat and not being very creative about it. Making enemies of your users is often a failing strategy.

Time will tell, but I agree that they are indeed in a tough spot. Probably not for the reasons that they think.

BeetleB - 10 hours ago

> Why would Anthropic get to dictate how someone uses a "tool" (that's literally what Claude Code is... a tool in a workflow)

Seriously?

It's their tool. And their service.

If this were a standalone tool that didn't rely on their service (like grep), I'd see your point. But it isn't - it's an extension of their service.

In reality, you can use the tool however you want. But they don't have to grant you access to their hosted service for every use case you can think of with the tool.

dakolli - 10 hours ago

[flagged]

arkits - 9 hours ago

Why does the Agent SDK or even claude -p exist then?

theptip - 9 hours ago

I guess I can see why they might nerf detected clients server side, but without evidence I would not assume it. Could also be so that 1) they can identify sus client IPs, 2) do a statistical analysis on distilled models to prove that their system prompts were clearly using unique tokens from Anthropic’s API.

pringk02 - 3 hours ago

> It's unclear on how this "punishes normal developers" in any shape or form.

There are, of course, no normal Chinese developers

dools - 13 hours ago

Why would a Chinese firm distilling the product use Claude code?

karaziox - 11 hours ago

They offer (extremely) discounted Claude prices but you have to go through their gateway. They subsidize part of that, and they get the low price by reselling unused Max capacity, there's been a few posts on that in the past months. People are apparently getting 90% discounts on their claude use this way, tradeoff is that you have two companies learning from your data, instead of just one. So people use the same tools they use normally, but get it for a lot cheaper

quantumleaper - 8 hours ago

[the comment was misinformed, deleted]

re - 8 hours ago

> Claude Code can decrypt summarized reasoning traces sent by the API.

Can you cite specifically what in the linked article or discussion leads you to say that?

AussieWog93 - 11 hours ago

I'd assume cost? Claude Code plans give like $5,000 worth of API usage for $200/mo.

SoKamil - 12 hours ago

They have some secret sauce not available through API maybe?

kordlessagain - 13 hours ago

To write distillation code, for one thing.

gck1 - 3 hours ago

> It's unclear on how this "punishes normal developers" in any shape or form

Tons of normal developers use ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL, the flag which activates the malware.

qwery - 8 hours ago

The article is really quite reasonable and calmly presented, actually. Your claim re. the intent of the fingerprinting is a guess. Normal developers are the users that aren't taking steps to avoid being flagged by this system.

The software is written in a deliberately obtuse way, presumably in service of some (unknown to us) goal. This is a deceptive and anti-social thing to do, it is by nature an adversarial stance to adopt. An already adversarial actor may be "punished" by this, but in such a relationship, hostility can be expected. A non-adversarial actor -- a normal developer / user -- is being harmed by this because the software is treating them as an adversary.

Further, lets assume your guess is correct and, in addition, that Anthropic elects to alter/downgrade/poison their service[0] for users that fit a particular pattern of markers. It's obvious how this system would "punish normal developers" (i.e. not the intended target/victim) that happen to fit those patterns.

[0] to some extent, the service already has been altered as its behaviour depends on the prompt text

Terr_ - 16 hours ago

> hysterical. The intent of this steg is excruciatingly clear

Even good goals do not excuse malicious or reckless execution. The ends do not always justify the means.

Whether or not it harmed you this time, it's a violation of trust and autonomy.

Surely you'd be angry if someone secretly installed a rootkit onto your computer, even if--at least for now--it only had code to try to detect and snitch on Public Enemy #1.

nomel - 16 hours ago

What do you see as malicious or reckless here, exactly?

This seems to be a VERY low resolution, functionally anonymous, bit of info, probably related to protecting their IP from bad actors breaking the TOS.

This looks like it's covered in the second bullet point of the "Personal data we automatically receive", that you consented to:

> Usage Information: We collect information about your use of the Services, such as the dates and times of access, browsing history, search, information about the links you click and about third-party applications, services, and content you integrate or interact with, pages you view, and other information about how you use the Services, and technology on the devices you use to access the Services.

What do you see as malicious or reckless here, exactly?

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/privacy

Davidzheng - 2 hours ago

Is it completely clear to you what the purpose of this is? It isn't completely clear to me but it's very likely it's an issue with me. I feel that it can be part of some larger counteroffensive against certain actors in China in a way that is more than just the signalling here--like maybe there's much more we haven't seen. In any case, it certainly shows their willingness to use less conventional tactics against those they view as adversaries.

lelanthran - 6 hours ago

> probably related to protecting their IP

The same IP that is a highly compressed collection of everyone's else's IP?

That's hilarious.

theshrike79 - 3 hours ago

If some other AI company wants a highly compressed collection of everyone else's IP, they can get it by themselves - not from Anthropic pre-compressed =)

lelanthran - 2 hours ago

Actually, no, I think I'll rather just take it from them.

computerex - 14 hours ago

I don't want my harness doing sneaky stuff like this. I don't want my harness data mining me. I want my harness to implement the agentic loop and I want it to be transparent.

BeetleB - 13 hours ago

> I don't want my harness doing sneaky stuff like this.

Since when was it your harness?

Switch to pi if this bothers you.

computerex - 12 hours ago

I made my own! https://github.com/computerex/z

solenoid0937 - 12 hours ago

Your harness isn't doing sneaky things unless you're breaking TOS. HN hysteria is unreal.

computerex - 12 hours ago

You may be ok with the harness doing 100 things that are not what I am using it for. But none everyone is, and it’s hardly hysterical. Perhaps you are simply careless.

justcool393 - 1 hour ago

> their IP

it's not IP, and it's certainly not their IP

> the TOS

oh no, the terms of service how dare people break those. you don't get to claim fair use while CFAAing everyone's actual IP then whine about the tos, and then when called out on spying on users point to it as if it being in the tos somehow justifies it

a lot of other malware has a tos too but we still call it for what it is

phoghed - 15 hours ago

Are you honestly surprised that roughly 0 HN users read that, or that they are loudly complaining about this, likely without even reading beyond the headline of this post?

BeetleB - 10 hours ago

> Surely you'd be angry if someone secretly installed a rootkit onto your computer

I surely would. What does that have to do with this scenario.

Note that the SW running on your machine is not doing anything malicious. The service is the thing that behaves in ways you want like - and that service is not running on your device.

There is no comparison with rootkits here. This is the equivalent of Google giving you a CLI to make searches easier, and that tool decides to just Rickroll you randomly. Annoying, yes. A security concern? No.

verdverm - 16 hours ago

False positives, we've seen them before when they degraded Fable silently based on the prompt/session

VortexLain - 12 hours ago

This is a problem of trust towards a software which runs on the user's machine and secretly conducts malware-like stenographic data exfiltration.

civet_java - 16 hours ago

Copying over my comment from elsewhere in this post:

Anthopic choosing to delay their models' invevitable distillation by competitors is their prerogative.

That they choose to implement it by fingerprinting my access patterns without first disclosing is where they shit the bed. It isn't "sneaky" it's straight up sneaky (and dishonest and unscrupulous while we're at it). That this particular instance is harmless doesn't give me much comfort. Who's to say they aren't harvesting PII?

That their actions make sense for their business isn't any reason for people to accept their deceitful, customer-hostile decisions.

Melatonic - 14 hours ago

Does their user agreement say they won't be harvesting PII?

IshKebab - 14 hours ago

> by fingerprinting my access patterns

It's based on whether your timezone is in China and your hostname matches a blacklist. Literally 2 bits of information. Not much of a fingerprint.

nozzlegear - 13 hours ago

That's what it's based on right now, anyway. What other bits of info will they add as the Chinese work around this spyware?

orbital-decay - 15 hours ago

To summarize what they've already been doing:

- filtering out people from the wrong side of "all humanity", years before it was demanded by the government

- downgrading their models in arbitrary ways (later saying "sorry but not really")

- actively sabotaging the replies, as in covertly modifying them to feed the users incorrect results

What's next to expect from Anthropic? Malware to brick your machine if they don't like you? Extending this to more people they don't like? I think I already can see how Dario's Amodei utopian visions of the future of "all humanity" are going to unfold.

solenoid0937 - 12 hours ago

HN hysteria is ridiculous.

All of this is totally understandable if you take the perspective that these people genuinely believe they're building superintelligence.

The overwhelming majority of the AI safety crowd - which has poured more of their life and time into thinking about these problems than the average HN armchair commentator ever would - understands that:

- you want to prevent China from getting to superintelligence first

- you must gate access of SI to known good actors

- and that this is a race that will result in the extinction of humanity if you fail in these goals

Literally everything these people do is totally understandable if you drop the assumption that they're lying when they say "we think we are building superintelligence."

Laurel1234 - 54 minutes ago

> All of this is totally understandable if you take the perspective that these people genuinely believe they're building superintelligence.

They aren't, they are building LLMs. They aren't even building AGI and they all know it.

Hell, even if they came up with AGI, then Anthropic's service model would become slavery so I'm not sure why they'd want to.

Biganon - 12 hours ago

> HN hysteria is ridiculous.

> this is a race that will result in the extinction of humanity if you fail in these goals

solenoid0937 - 12 hours ago

Ah yes, the very hysterical take that superintelligence must be carefully developed, or it likely ends badly for all of us.

How irrational and hysterical of me!

Laurel1234 - 51 minutes ago

Then why THE FUCK would we want to develop it? If you're so scared that what you're building will lead to our extinction, stop fucking building it. Why are you booster freaks so weird and psychotic?

Biganon - 12 hours ago

How does it lead to the end of humanity if China reaches it first? You really think the US is more trustworthy?

solenoid0937 - 11 hours ago

What are the PRC's values?

How are individual freedoms in China?

What happens if you criticize the government as a Chinese citizen?

Is it a good thing if a government that turns its citizens into red pulp for criticism, or disappears them in the middle of the night, or bans access to most media, is the first to a godlike superintelligence that gives them de-facto control of (and impose their values upon) the whole world?

Or is it better if democratic nations get there first?

If the latter, which democratic nations are best positioned to get to superintelligence before China?

orbital-decay - 11 hours ago

Can you substitute PRC/China for Anthropic and try answering your questions?

solenoid0937 - 11 hours ago

No company will own superintelligence. Governments will, just like governments own nuclear weapons (developed by companies).

So the comparison is with the US, not Anthropic.

The US doesn't turn its citizens into a fine red purée for criticizing it.

The US doesn't censor most media.

It is strictly better for a democratic nation like the US to get to superintelligence before a country that will gladly blend its citizens for criticizing it, and censor anything that dares to challenge its power.

dakolli - 2 hours ago

Are you living in a cave? The US just sent someone to prison for 30 years for passing out political magazines at a protest.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/...

The US has a larger prison population than China. The US does not have a great human rights record.. Have you not been following what's going on at CBS? Have you never used X?

someonebaggy - 52 minutes ago

[dead]

skywhopper - 53 minutes ago

Democratic nations, at the behest of their billionaire patrons, are rapidly pursuing China’s approach to governance.

scott01 - 11 hours ago

Projection. Your account posts mostly negative or passive aggressive comments.

solenoid0937 - 11 hours ago

I suppose I'm sick of armchair commentators on AI safety that haven't actually done any critical thinking on AI safety.

dakolli - 2 hours ago

you're actually the dumbest person on this website.

orbital-decay - 12 hours ago

The purpose of system is what it does. Can you read their previous musings about the glorious future, look at what they actually do, read Amodei's batshit insane nationalistic rants, and say in all seriousness yeah it's the kind of people I want to entrust my entire future life?

>you want to prevent China from getting to superintelligence first

I don't. Prevent, not even outpace? Why? Seems like you're assuming China "winning" whatever race it is effectively ends the humanity. Right now I think Chinese labs are way more mature about this, and Anthropic is way more dangerous than them. And how does it fit into the "for the benefit of all humanity" narrative we keep hearing? Is China wrong humanity? Who else is going to end up in the wrong part? Are you sure it's not you?

>if you drop the assumption that they're lying when they say "we think we are building superintelligence."

I never assumed that, I know perfectly who Anthropic are and that they believe everything they say as self-evident, without having any doubts. And I know they're the kind of people who can convince themselves in anything, because they're obviously smarter than everyone else, and become detached from reality. The entire US "AI safety community" was born in rationalist circles and is largely like this, it's a very specific cult. This is exactly the kind of people who are going to create hell on Earth for you and the rest if given even a lick of actual power, and perfectly rationalize it as a necessity.

solenoid0937 - 12 hours ago

[flagged]

krthr - 1 hour ago

> Do you know how their human rights violations compare to, say, western nations?

Yes, I could even say that the violations on the U.S. side have been more numerous and worse.

silver_silver - 10 hours ago

> Do you know how their human rights violations compare to, say, western nations?

You have to be joking

solenoid0937 - 6 hours ago

Please do some research on how they treat their own dissident citizens.

57k citizens disappeared since 2013, and another 5k every year. Their human rights lawyers sent to concentration camps, forced to eat their own shit, raped, and then murdered.

Mere online criticism of the government gets you a visit from the police and gets you put on the watchlist. Often a few months' imprisonment without trial.

This is not even mentioning the fact that most media is censored in China.

You are out of your mind if you think China has a better human rights record than western nations.

tripzilch - 56 minutes ago

You are out of your mind if you're lumping the US together with other western nations when it comes to human rights.

n_kr - 3 hours ago

I'm not doubting you but could you provide sources for your claims? TIA

orbital-decay - 11 hours ago

>Please actually do a modicum of research into AI safety. Your comment is the equivalent of a patient with zero context, arguing against the position of established medical science.

What makes you think I didn't? You're talking like it's self-evident and adopt the condescending tone from the start, without giving any actual arguments why. (I'm not really interested in them as all these discussions are pointless and we had them back in ~2015)

>A "cult" implies belief in something unknowable/unprovable.

Yes, precisely. Also the gods and religious practices. Rationalists and subsequently AI safety branch invented a religion in a roundabout way.

>"The entire medical community was born in medical circles and it's a very specific cult"

Medicine is largely based on evidence and real-life observations, unlike AI safety which is based on belief in something that doesn't exist and some unprovable lore that is entirely rationalized without any grounding, and is expected to be self-evident (because it obviously is) and believed by the others. One is science, another is policy.

>Are you familiar with the history of the PRC?

Yes, I know it extremely well. I also know the history of the US, am familiar with the people who do AI research in the US from before they started doing this, and can see the actual reality.

solenoid0937 - 11 hours ago

> Rationalists and subsequently AI safety branch invented a religion in a roundabout way

If you are arguing in good faith you can very clearly reason about any given AI safety take. Case in point, you refused to engage with most of the questions because you know the conclusions they lead to.

> Medicine is largely based on evidence and real-life observations, unlike AI safety

"AI safety doesn't exist" is certainly a take.

> Yes, I know it extremely well. I also know the history of the US and see the actual reality.

Why do you think it's better that a country that turns its citizens into a pulp for criticizing the government, and censors most media to control its citizens' thoughts, reach SI before one that is democratically elected and in which you can generally criticize the government?

rescbr - 10 hours ago

> Why do you think it's better that a country that turns its citizens into a pulp for criticizing the government, and censors most media to control its citizens' thoughts, reach SI before one that is democratically elected and in which you can generally criticize the government?

Which country are you referring to? As an outsider who is neither American or Chinese, day by day it seems like the US is inching towards the same path as the criticized one.

solenoid0937 - 6 hours ago

You cannot be serious if you think this. Please do some actual research on how China treats dissident citizens.

They ship their human rights lawyers off to concentration camps, force them to eat their own feces, then rape and/or murder them. 57k citizens disappeared since 2013, at least 5k more every year.

I don't get disappeared for criticizing the US government online. The US government doesn't censor most media I can consume. These nations are not even in the same galaxy when it comes to human rights. They are not comparable in the slightest.

It is shocking how many people on HN have such a poor understanding of the state of the world. Spend some time outside the tech world. Your liberal arts education has to have seriously failed you if you thought this was a reasonable comparison.

Perenti - 5 hours ago

To be honest, my first thought was also that the line between how the US treats its citizens and how China does theirs is very fine. You may not be aware of how the USA is represented outside the USA.

Quite a lot of serious people think this way, in many parts of the world.

tripzilch - 53 minutes ago

> I don't get disappeared for licking the US government's taint.

ftfy

also maybe look up the history of the word "hysteria", that you seem to like so much

YeGoblynQueenne - 57 minutes ago

>> Why do you think it's better that a country that turns its citizens into a pulp for criticizing the government, and censors most media to control its citizens' thoughts, reach SI before one that is democratically elected and in which you can generally criticize the government?

Stress on "generally".

orbital-decay - 10 hours ago

I believe I clearly marked my position without necessarily addressing those questions one by one, because it leads to an endless chain similar to ones we used to have a decade or more ago. The problem is that you don't seem to even acknowledge that viewpoints other than yours could exist in principle. I don't know how to reason with people talking about abstract matters like game theory as some ultimate source of truth without even mentioning axioms/grounding, applicability, experimentation, and actual real life complexities.

solenoid0937 - 10 hours ago

No, the problem is that you can't address why a nation that censors its citizenry, puts/disappears dissidents into concentration camps for decades, and makes its own human rights lawyers literally eat their own shit, before raping and/or murdering them - is better suited to reach superintelligence before the US (given that these are the only two left in the race for the superintelligence - I'd prefer the EU.)

You haven't provided a consistent counterpoint to any rationalist/safety viewpoint. I could acknowledge one if you actually provided a counterpoint, but you just say "it's a cult and it's wrong" without addressing the underlying argument.

damnnigga - 9 hours ago

[dead]

VortexLain - 18 hours ago

Codex CLI is FOSS, unlike Claude Code, so Codex is less likely to do things like that, and it's one more reason to avoid Claude Code and Claude in general. Hopefully, many eyes will be looking into Codex for malicious things like that.

loufe - 17 hours ago

Genuine question though, why would I care about this if I'm paying for a subscription and adhering to TOS. I'm very skeptical about their privacy policy, business practices, and so on, but am curious what the negative about this is. Seems like it would work to my favour as a customer pushing back any date of the cutting of subsidies.

That said, these fraudulent proxies are helping Chinese labs keep up, which might be to my advantage long term in eventually having a high quality private AI I fully control on my own hardware. That's not support, but I do recognize the incentive, for whatever that's worth.

simonduchastel - 13 hours ago

One negative is that Claude Code is pretty buggy, and Anthropic makes frequent changes that cause unexpected regressions [0]. With the harness now doing weird stuff with proxies, I'd be worried of them inadvertently introducing bugs which affect people using the feature legitimately.

[0] A recent example: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/april-23-postmortem

OkWing99 - 12 hours ago

Maybe they should try running Mythos to check Claude Code, given their marketing with it's superior performance.

sanderjd - 14 hours ago

Because they could use (or maybe are already using) similar techniques to do things you don't approve of, without your awareness.

yard2010 - 14 hours ago

What if they decide you're not patriotic enough, serving you evil models, because one man with a lot of shmeckels told them to?

s3p - 13 hours ago

Then I could just.. cancel my subscription and stop paying?

largbae - 8 hours ago

Right. They really should wait until _after_ the regulatory capture bit is locked in to mess with users.

Laurel1234 - 2 hours ago

How would you know? They've already degraded model performance silently.

fartcoin67 - 14 hours ago

[dead]

qwery - 8 hours ago

First they came for the [clients with specific timezones and/or bizarrely formatted dates] and I did nothing. Then they came for the [users that spell favour the good way, with a 'u' in it], etc.

> why would I care about this

It's up to you, of course. But I think you're making a mistake in assuming it could, in any way, benefit you as a customer. This isn't specific to this company or the particulars of the business that they're in.

Simply put, you stand to lose more than they do and they are relentless in seeking, maintaining and exploiting any leverage they have over you. Further, any power they gain over one individual customer tends to generalise to all customers. Further further, one company's leverage is another company's right.

Not being bothered by the practice is accepting the terms set by the business. Acceptance invites escalation. Relentless.

Even more simply put, you should care because this is how you get John Deere.

Kevcmk - 6 hours ago

What a historically bad take

scottyah - 16 hours ago

"malicious"? Seems like a great way to filter users breaching the TOS while not impeding on normal users. A FOSS client just means they're doing more analysis hidden on their servers.

Laurel1234 - 2 hours ago

Anthropic is built on raping TOS and copyright.

dannyw - 18 hours ago

It's released and signed by GitHub I believe (although not deterministic builds), but there's at least a little bit of provenance that you're getting the real repository.

algoth1 - 18 hours ago

But wasnt claude code leaked? Why wasnt this found earlier?

zeafoamrun - 17 hours ago

It doesn't take long for them to vibe code new features for CC

nicce - 17 hours ago

Or vibe code it completely differently. After all, they have basically unlimited access to best models with maximum speed if they just wanted to.

bakugo - 17 hours ago

This specific form of steganography was not present when the leak happened, as far as I can tell.

gck1 - 3 hours ago

> The trigger is ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL, Claude Code's API base URL override

I had a use case where I had to MITM CC's traffic to strip credentials that could have accidentally made it into the harness.

I'm happy my paranoid self told me "You don't really know what they're doing with that flag or if they're honoring it for all requests", so made a decision to proxy it at the network extension level.

Also, does anyone remember Anthropic quite literally sabotaging your project if the classifier in front of fable thought you were working in the AI industry? After backlash, they pulled it back, now they did this. Anthropic is on a weird tangent to ship malware. If someone doesn't stop them, one day, this will backfire catastrophically.

muldvarp - 2 hours ago

I'd love to work for some company distilling frontier models. Seems like interesting work and screwing with OpenAI, Anthropic and Google would feel fantastic.

maxwellg - 16 hours ago

> If the client wants to detect custom API gateways, it can say so plainly. It can send an explicit telemetry field with documentation. It can make the policy visible. It can put the behavior in release notes.

This seems like a very naive response. If clients send explicit telemetry fields to the gateway, a malicious gateway can trivially strip or modify the field to conform to what normal traffic looks like. The steganography cat-and-mouse game is valuable because it is much harder for a gateway to continuously reverse engineer all the fingerprinting mechanisms used. Sure, some malicious gateways will be able to stay on top of things, but not all - and not always.

solenoid0937 - 12 hours ago

Seriously, the author has clearly never had to deal with client abuse.

This is a total non issue unless you are Chinese distilling lab.

morpheuskafka - 5 hours ago

Well, the first filter catches anyone whose timezone is set to mainland China. That includes presumably all individual devs just using a VPN, who have no desire to or knowledge of distilling.

(Again, could be trivially bypassed either by rewriting, mocking the timezone call, or just changing the timezone. But we are assuming no mitigation used.)

felooboolooomba - 12 hours ago

Old Marv from Cocke County, Tennessee had a distilling lab too. I'm not sure if he'd have issues too. Well, probably many issues but unrelated.

transcriptase - 36 minutes ago

I wonder if he knows John Lee Pettimore? Grandaddy ran whisky in a big black dodge…

klntsky - 16 hours ago

I would add that it would probably work even better than a KYC at least for some time until discovered, given that there is a very developed international market for KYC bypass services

matheusmoreira - 18 hours ago

I reported a similar system prompt injection mechanism here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48259288

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/62061

Looks like they just keep finding new "creative" uses for such things, as expected. I'll keep patching them out.

sillysaurusx - 12 hours ago

Thanks for doing this. I had no idea the system prompt was embedding things like "avoid abstractions; three similar lines of code are better than one helper." Stuff I disagree with.

Is there a way to modify these prompts e.g. by putting instructions in CLAUDE.md to override it? I know it won’t directly modify the system prompt, but it seems like CLAUDE.md should have the final say, shouldn’t it?

matheusmoreira - 9 hours ago

> I had no idea the system prompt was embedding things like "avoid abstractions; three similar lines of code are better than one helper."

You ain't seen nothing yet. It used to say "Try the simplest approach first. Do not overdo it. Be extra concise."

https://gist.github.com/roman01la/483d1db15043018096ac3babf5...

Let's just say the words "simplest fix" trigger me to this day.

> I know it won’t directly modify the system prompt

I directly modify the system prompts in the Claude Code executable. I don't want the models to see contradictory instructions.

I asked Claude himself to port the above patcher script to Python.

https://github.com/matheusmoreira/.files/blob/master/%7E/.lo...

Every once in a while I ask Claude to download and dissect the latest Claude Code executable to see if Anthropic screwed up the prompts again. If I see anything bad I add it to the script. Only then do I update Claude Code.

It was during one of these script maintenance sessions that I noticed the server side prompt injection mechanism. I'll also tell Claude to look for and disable this steganography nonsense from now on as well.

I usually audit the environment variables too.

> it seems like CLAUDE.md should have the final say

I wouldn't count on it.

chrisjj - 11 minutes ago

[delayed]

edude03 - 17 hours ago

I don't understand the privacy concerns the author is trying to highlight. Granted, doing anything "sneaky" will always raise suspicious once caught, but on the other hand, there would be no point in implementing these "security features" if they were upfront about how they work.

And no, IMO stenography isn't security by obscurity, in the same that using RSA and keeping the private key private isn't security by obscurity - keeping the private thing private is part of the security model.

civet_java - 16 hours ago

Anthopic choosing to delay their models' invevitable distillation by competitors is their prerogative.

That they choose to implement it by fingerprinting my access patterns without first disclosing is where they shit the bed. It isn't "sneaky" it's straight up sneaky (and dishonest and unscrupulous while we're at it). That this particular instance is harmless doesn't give me much comfort. Who's to say they aren't harvesting PII?

That their actions make sense for their business isn't any reason for people to accept their deceitful, customer-hostile decisions.

edude03 - 12 hours ago

I'm using "sneaky" here to refer to anything that's not very obviously stated but anyway

> That their actions make sense for their business isn't any reason for people to accept their deceitful, customer-hostile decisions.

While I agree it's a dangerous precedence to set, I think this is a "vote with your wallet" sort of situation. They shouldn't do it, but from their POV this is what they need to do to offer the product they do at the price they do. If the product wasn't compelling people wouldn't accept that they do this. However they've decided if you want their product you have to use their interface and whatever spyware it comes with, so it comes down to, is the value proposition good enough that people will put up with it? As of today, the answer is unfortunately yes

civet_java - 12 hours ago

Thanks for the considered response.

> I think this is a "vote with your wallet" sort of situation.

I agree a 100%.

> is the value proposition good enough that people will put up with it? As of today, the answer is unfortunately yes

I don't fully agree with you here and I think the jury is still out on that.

In any case, I look forward to seeing international markets responding to the current situation.

scottyah - 16 hours ago

Would a filter like this make it seem less likely that they're harvesting PII? Why would they need this if they were tracking all user queries with a finer-toothed comb?

civet_java - 15 hours ago

If by a "finer-toothed comb" you mean telemetry then I don't quite see it as comparable to this situation.

Telemetry is disclosed in privacy policies, it can usually be opted out of and if not that, then it can be blocked by a firewall. Steganographically fingerprinting customer's network routing when they consented to your tool reading a txt file is a different problem. Anthropic has demonstrated capability and willingness to embed arbitrary obfuscated data in their comms streams and that's a dangerous precedent to set.

hnfong - 17 hours ago

If the countries were reversed, and some Chinese software implemented an equivalent "security feature" to track US users, it would be all over the news about how China is conducting spying and espionage on America.

Or maybe you don't understand this hypothetical situation either, but I'm suspecting you just don't care about other people's privacy.

edude03 - 12 hours ago

> maybe you don't understand this hypothetical situation

> I'm suspecting you just don't care about other people's privacy.

Quite a leap to assume I have neither basic reading comprehension skills nor care for privacy, but assuming I'm just misunderstanding you - I think this is the fundamental disconnect between security and privacy.

For one, most of this data is already collected openly by most apps and sites on the internet in countries all over the world, they just call it "analytics" and preventing tools like ublock from blocking them is an ongoing cat and mouse game.

Secondly - as someone who buys a bunch of electronics from companies headquartered in china (DJI, Insta360, Roborock immediately come to mind) they already have both normal analytics like in point one, and anti tampering/ anti forfeiting / anti reverse engineering features that are at least as, but often more, invasive than this.

Thirdly, and probably most importantly - as the author states, you're using a tool that by design and to be effective, uploads your private data to a third party for processing. You use it knowing that once the API request is made you have no idea what's going to happen to that data and this again is just fundamental to how (cloud hosted) LLMs work - the only privacy preserving option is to run your own LLMs at home or remotely on hardware you control

MattDamonSpace - 19 hours ago

“So the feature mostly punishes the exact people who are easier to fingerprint: normal developers doing weird but legitimate things”

What’s the punishment here exactly?

pedropaulovc - 19 hours ago

Higher odds of being banned for legitimate usage.

solenoid0937 - 12 hours ago

If you are accessing Claude through the listed domains it is not "legitimate use."

dakolli - 2 hours ago

for using a proxy service.. wtf

Beigale - 15 hours ago

[dead]

eli - 16 hours ago

For being flagged as possibly a competitor? They nuke your account.

femboyvtuber - 19 hours ago

Returning invalid poisoned different results that were not what you paid for

thepasch - 17 hours ago

> What’s the punishment here exactly?

Seeing as how Anthropic cannot stop raising a stink about "illicit Chinese distillation attacks" every month or so, I'd bet money on them either already silently degrading model performance if any of the identification patterns match, or, at the very least, considering it/doing dry runs.

Particularly considering that they've openly stated that the technology to do so exists and that they were going to use it in production on Fable.

bakugo - 19 hours ago

Output poisoning and/or eventual account bans, if I had to guess.

realusername - 19 hours ago

They probably run a heavily dumbed down version of the model, same as what they got caught doing with Fable.

And that's also why, as a legitimate customer, want none of it, you never know if you accidentally entered a zone they don't like.

mgraczyk - 18 hours ago

"got caught"

to clarify, this behavior was announced with the model release

pishpash - 18 hours ago

The extent got caught.

bel8 - 18 hours ago

if by announce you mean shove it somewhere in a pdf with hundreds of pages, yes

Quinner - 17 hours ago

https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-fable-5-mythos-5

This is not hundreds of pages and it gets its own bold headline section.

bel8 - 14 hours ago

Wrong. That page is after they walked back because of the outrage. The original was on the PDF as reported in this article:

> If Claude Fable stops helping you, you'll never know

https://jonready.com/blog/posts/claude-fable5-is-allowed-to-...

HN post with 1k+ comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48467896

DonsDiscountGas - 14 hours ago

The original announcement page mentioned this. It was very obvious. That's why so many people noticed it immediately, because it was announced.

bicepjai - 5 hours ago

AI companies are running a compressed version of Google’s “don’t be evil” arc. Google took the better part of a decade to quietly retire the motto; these companies are speedrunning the same trajectory in a year or two

TheDong - 3 hours ago

1. 2022 A non-profit literally quote "to better all of humanity, not shareholders"

2. 2024 For profit, but "we will train biases out of our models and make sure our AI is safe to use"

3. 2025 We'll make sure it doesn't take over the world, with like a 70% confidence interval

4. 2025 The mecha-hitler inflection point

5. 2026 Our new model is so terrifying it will destroy all of security and hack the chinese, we can't let the chinese use it

6. 2028 (projected) Our new model requires so much energy that 30% of the elderly population will die without AC, but it will be stronger than the chinese models and let us destroy china

7. 2030 (projected) Our new model will triumph over the mecha-hitler dictator model, and will be a benevolent dictator that only demands 60% of all energy produced, not 98%

sebastiennight - 18 hours ago

Can somebody clarify for me - if ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL is set to a different provider... then isn't this "marked" system prompt being sent to that provider's API rather than Anthropic's?

I understand how this can be useful to Anthropic if the 3rd-party is acting as a proxy (because they end up hitting the Claude API with the marked prompt), but it looks like requests where "hostname contains deepseek" would never be sending data to Anthropic. What am I missing?

pmxi - 18 hours ago

This catches Claude resellers. Meaning companies who proxy Claude traffic for users in, say, China.

https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...

skeptic_ai - 18 hours ago

Won’t catch many after has been on hn home page. And now the providers will be even more careful to upgrade the cc code. Might even provide their own agent to prevent this mockery. And isn’t what anthropic did unauthorized use of another pc which is kind of illegal?

sandeepkd - 18 hours ago

Thats the thing, hoping to control things on client side like this is a lost battle if you are dealing with technical clients. The best they can do is probably based on IP, but again the motivated clients would just create bastion servers in allowed IP ranges. I am surprised why are they even throwing resources in this kind of effort.

jgilias - 17 hours ago

“Hey Claude, fix the issues with Chinese resellers and distillers. Make no mistake”

pishpash - 17 hours ago

"Catch" as in made a list?

eli - 16 hours ago

Of the accounts involved, yeah. So they can lock them out.

andrewmunsell - 18 hours ago

My guess is for distillation, they need to forward the prompt to Anthropic to get the real Anthropic model's response so they can train their own models on it

dannyw - 18 hours ago

The theory is probably Deepseek might be collecting those streams, and sending a portion of it to Anthropic to see what the Anthropic/Opus response would be.

eli - 16 hours ago

Seems like a pretty straightforward approach to collecting session logs from a bunch of different people/devices would be to have them all set their base url to proxy.deepseek.whatever which logs the data and forwards to the real API.

andai - 18 hours ago

Did I understand correctly, that custom base URL triggers this behavior? So if I'm running Claude through a LLM proxy, I'm also affected?

wett - 17 hours ago

Ask Claude to check, lol

nixosbestos - 17 hours ago

I am also really confused and annoyingly stuck on this. I understand that the model name might appear in prompts for distillation (I guess? "You are RipOffModelv2, learn from these responses from Claude")?

I guess the only explanation is that there's a side-telemetry channel that still sends some data to Anthropic, regardless of ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL overrides.

sebastiennight - 17 hours ago

> I understand that the model name might appear in prompts for distillation (I guess? "You are RipOffModelv2, learn from these responses from Claude")

This does not make sense. You wouldn't send such a prompt to the Claude model. And when you're sending the prompt (anywhere) you don't have the response yet. This is not how distillation works.

nixosbestos - 13 hours ago

Right, sorry, I'm trying to catch up (in general) here, and am working through assumptions to get my bearings.

What you say makes sense, but further adds to my confusion as to why those model names would appear in input sent to Claude at all, then. EDIT: I guess it might be because someone might point Claude at a compatible API, with its model in the URL, which is of interest to them.

MallocVoidstar - 17 hours ago

There are a lot of companies reselling Claude to Chinese users. You use their base URL but it's still going to Anthropic.

breakingcups - 15 hours ago

To clarify why Anthropic wants to catch these parties: they save all session logs and sell them to other LLM firms (for distillation) and have been known to use stolen credit-cards to pay for the Anthropic accounts.

I'm quite all right with the first, not with the second of course.

LPisGood - 19 hours ago

This is very interesting. Combating resellers and distillation seems like a very difficult problem indeed. Interesting to me is that these techniques mentioned in the article are just like anti-observation techniques used by some of the more sophisticated malware out there, however defeating them is pretty trivial.

_alternator_ - 19 hours ago

Yes, defeating this is relatively easy, particularly for sophisticated actors. But it's hard to always defeat all of the tricks. Sort of like how it's expensive and hard and uncertain to defeat all of the tricks when forging money.

Here's an example. Say you have your team use patched binaries. Then CC updates and requires a new patched binary with new tricks. You now have to have a team ready to analyze the binary and begin to address the tricks; meanwhile, unpatched code is now a fingerprint. If some researcher decides to update Claude on their own to access new features, they get fingerprinted.

Defeating a single fingerprinting technique once is easy. Defeating all of the techniques all the time is hard.

SubiculumCode - 18 hours ago

Not to mention, it isn't that hard for vendor's to require updated code to run the product. Vendors do this all the time.

pishpash - 18 hours ago

Corporate surveillance malware on employee machines is also defeatable but most don't bother.

charcircuit - 18 hours ago

Is it hard? Just ask AI if the update added any new fingerprinting vectors?

_alternator_ - 18 hours ago

I'd love for you to try this and report back. My guess is that no models today will successfully run a binary analysis for fingerprinting without a lot of handholding. If you try to use Opus it will almost certainly decline (and fingerprint/ban you).

charcircuit - 18 hours ago

Not with Claude Code, but I trivially had Opus scan other closed source software for fingerprinting, including native libraries that it called into.

_alternator_ - 18 hours ago

Can you share more details? I ask because my experience suggests that models still require a decent amount of expertise to use for binary analysis (largely inferring because of use on other tasks of this level). I would expect models to always find "something" when you ask for stenographic techniques in the code, but with an extremely high false positive rate.

charcircuit - 17 hours ago

I don't think the diffs between Claude releases are that big. The amount of code in a diff doing sketchy stuff like looking into the host environment is going to be pretty small and obvious for the model. You can do things like ask for what an update included that wasn't mentioned in the release notes and stuff like that.

Laurel1234 - 2 hours ago

> these techniques mentioned in the article are just like anti-observation techniques used by some of the more sophisticated malware out there, however defeating them is pretty trivial.

Really makes you think huh

mysterydip - 19 hours ago

seems ironically like a similar problem of content owners trying to filter bot scrapers from legit users

pradeep1177 - 13 hours ago

I used my proxy https://github.com/softcane/cc-blackbox setup to capture this.

This is how it looks.

# userEmail The user's email address is <my email>. # currentDate Today's date is 2026-06-30.

      IMPORTANT: this context may or may not be relevant to your tasks. You should not respond to this context unless it is highly relevant to your task.

</system-reminder>

I also do not understand what's the point of this, because if I have a gateway that can detect it, then we can replace the text before forwarding to the model, so what's the catch?

gtirloni - 12 hours ago

The catch is you didn't know about this until today?

puttycat - 13 hours ago

Yes, a very easy and destructive man-in-the-middle attack seems likely.

pradeep1177 - 13 hours ago

But the whole point of this is to prevent the distillation and identify the list of blocked providers. If a provider is capturing the proxy, they can identify and modify that as well, so it only looks legitimate to the model. What am I missing here?

jameslk - 14 hours ago

That's wild. If Anthropic is willing to risk ruining the trust of their userbase for the sake of protecting their moat, it makes me wonder how strong of a moat they have to begin with

solenoid0937 - 10 hours ago

No business loses trust for this, this is just standard client side anti tamper/anti RE stuff

It's a total non issue unless you're a Chinese distillation lab

tgtweak - 18 hours ago

None of this is surprising - they're trying to mask and relay when they detect known patterns of what looks like distillation attacks and client app copying/modification. The list obfuscation here is likely to prevent or make it difficult for those same adversaries to work around this or delete/null it out when making a bootleg copy.

Cool reverse engineering/analysis report but if this is the extent of nefarious activity that came of it (trying to catch/mitigate chinese lab model distillations), that's kind of encouraging.

throwawayffffas - 19 hours ago

Claude code does feel very malwarey to be honest. They have been like that from the start.

bythreads - 2 hours ago

I’d do the same for a11y an internationalization purposes - however this is juts a bad implementation of it from an americans perspective.

You’d change seperators and position if you truly wanted to do this right

Its basic date wrangling and tbh i see nothing malfeasant here

Its basically yyyy/mm/dd yy/M/d mm-dd-yyyy stuff but suuuuper lazily done

fny - 18 hours ago

This was already discovered during the source map leak.

> This is not a malicious feature, but it is a weird choice for a developer tool that asks for trust.

They already tell you they scan for malicious prompts, and they have no ZDR guarantees for consumers. Why do signatures like this matter at all?

llelouch - 18 hours ago

There has been an anti anthropic propaganda push by bad actors across social media sites especially Reddit and twitter. This started a few months ago when anthropic started beating openai.

solenoid0937 - 12 hours ago

I was browsing Threads and saw a lot of Anthropic hate. Randomly clicked on a profile and looked them up on LinkedIn - literally an OpenAI PR guy.

pdantix - 5 hours ago

openai staff on twitter are absolutely obsessed with claude and anthropic, just taking petty/dishonest shots and RTing the same, it's honestly embarrassing to watch

gck1 - 1 hour ago

> This started a few months ago when anthropic started beating openai.

From where I'm standing, this started a few months ago when Anthropic decided to gaslight users, sabotage their projects, ship malware and attempt a regulatory capture.

If there's an anti-ANT propaganda, it is solely of ANT's own making.

throw10920 - 9 hours ago

Altman is also exactly the kind of person who would resort to tactics like this.

zulban - 17 hours ago

Absolutely. Nothing makes me believe dead internet theory more than text threads discussing anyhropic and openai.

ervistrupja - 1 hour ago

Is it possible that Claude Code is vibecoded and full of spyware and it's possible Anthropic doesn't even know what's in there anymore. This is an unacceptable security risk.

dehrmann - 18 hours ago

Anthropic must think that their moat isn't very large if they're this worried about distillation.

helloplanets - 16 hours ago

Dario's been openly talking how worried he is about China and labs getting synthetic training data off their models, for years. Most recently in relation to "Mythos level" capabilities.

Not really distillation, just synthetic training data.

throw10920 - 9 hours ago

That's...a good thing. A "moat" is an anticompetitive practice. You don't want companies to have moats.

Meanwhile, if you mean "Anthropic must think their technical advantage isn't very large..." then your conclusion is literally disproven by your premise.

dgellow - 18 hours ago

What moat?

elAhmo - 3 hours ago

Great find! I would just add that trust is indeed in the boring parts, but with gymnastics like this trust can be irreversibly lost. Then, no matter how boring tool is, there is no going back.

Anthropic has become a choice for many developers because of Claude Code, but in the recents months with "small things" like this and whole Fable fiasco they are *actively* pushing people to both competitors and local alternatives.

And if someone spends a significant amount of time and money to switch, it will be really hard for Anthropic to get those people back.

rldjbpin - 1 hour ago

the list of hostnames and words they compare the base url values with is just a nice advertising for these providers for me.

regardless, while you are not logged in and using a non-anthropic model (which is now fortunately feasible), there is nothing that affects your day-to-day.

the rest is just lame cat-and-mouse shenanigans to keep an eye out for.

ryanisnan - 18 hours ago

This is weird but, help me understand how this meaningfully impacts our exposure.

I'm authenticated to Claude, so they already have the whole attribution thing solved.

chinathrow - 17 hours ago

User != paying person/company/reseller.

morpheuskafka - 9 hours ago

The timezone checks for Shanghai and Urumqi, but not Hong Kong. All of these are the same actual time (China does not use time zones internally), not sure how these three were picked (why not Beijing or Macau etc). And all of them are prohibited by ToS, so not sure why they only flag mainland time zones.

Interestingly, my device is in Shenzhen right now, but macOS has assigned Shanghai as the "closest city" rather than Hong Kong which is geographically closer. I am curious if there is any documentation on how that is assigned.

vianchen - 5 hours ago

Because HK is highly autonomous. If say mainland China decides to observe different time zones, Asia/Shanghai and Asia/Hong Kong would diverge. Of course, that is very unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future.

est - 8 hours ago

or Singapore/Perth

sigmoid10 - 19 hours ago

If they only collect the data for analysis I guess this is fine (they already get way more sensitive data from users anyways, so if privacy is your concern you've made the mistake many steps ago). The much more interesting question is if they directly act on this data in their API. For example by rate-limiting, compute-limiting or rerouting to weaker models. That might even be legally questionable. I would really like to see this as a follow-up analysis, but I guess it is way more difficult and will also cost quite a bit in tokens.

SubiculumCode - 18 hours ago

Would it be legally questionable, or actually complying with U.S. export law?

sigmoid10 - 2 hours ago

I'm thinking more of EULAs. Even if Anthropic somehow wedges this into their TOS, it might still be illegal. For example, in many US states this could potentially be classified as consumer fraud. You can't just sell one thing and then secretly and intransparently turn it into something else before shipping it. And in the EU it might violate GDPR too.

bakugo - 18 hours ago

I've heard that it was possible to trigger really obvious output poisoning on Fable with something as basic as asking the model to think outside of its built-in hidden thinking delimiters.

This watermark may trigger a similar mechanism.

krupan - 18 hours ago

"If they only collect the data for analysis I guess this is fine"

I think you missed the memo on how foolish this attitude is. It came out around the time Edward Snowden made his discoveries at the NSA public. I suggest you look into it

sigmoid10 - 18 hours ago

As I said above, if you are worried about privacy while hooking up Claude Code, you need to reevaluate your understanding of this technology.

john01dav - 12 hours ago

They're running code on users' computers that it would not be reasonable to think that the user consented to running on their computer. This is CFAA-violation-shaped. Of course, they won't be prosecuted if it is indeed a violation, and I do not know for sure if it meets the specific legal criteria. However, it is something that I think should be illegal. Make it so if software does something that would be unreasonable to think that the user wants to happen, it needs to make that abundantly clear before it does it, otherwise it's a CFAA or similar violation. This would, of course, have very broad consequences. However, this Claude issue feels particularly violating to me.

willchen - 5 hours ago

i think this underscores why having coding agents being open-source is a really good thing

port3000 - 18 hours ago

That's a lot of effort when they could just play a short video saying 'You wouldn't steal a car' instead

100ms - 19 hours ago

What's the point of even trying to obfuscate this with such a simple method? Could at least have hidden the targeted features by storing their hashes or embedding a bloom filter or similar

ajb - 18 hours ago

In this case, this is probably not the only stereographic tattletale.

Had a competitor pull something like this with a previous employer. They were supposed to be interoperating with a standard, but they had a secret steganographic handshake, which they used to pretend that competitors products were unreliable (they had a first mover position in a smaller national market with specific requirements, so this wasn't shooting themselves in the foot). Our guys figured out the handshake and just silently implemented it. In this case, the competitor wasn't big enough to waste engineering time on multiple such hacks, but Anthropic have time (or Claude does).

gonzalohm - 19 hours ago

The point is not raising red flags I guess

kej - 19 hours ago

I love how well this comment works as a vexillology joke, even if it wasn't intended.

Amekedl - 3 hours ago

This entire steganographically marking feature is prolly vibecoded like everything regarding claude code. They can try sure, but classic cat and mice game dictates: thankfully the chinese WILL keep distilling.

kuschku - 47 minutes ago

Considering this is tracking, processing, and transmitting data, and algorithmically making decisions about users, why doesn't this show up in their privacy policy, nor in their GDPR exports?

Sounds like a very expensive lawsuit waiting to happen (GDPR allows fining up to 4% of global revenue, not profits)

pknerd - 3 hours ago

Anthropic is angry that others are doing what it's good at: stealing content

blueeon - 3 hours ago

If they believe this is entirely correct, they could express it in a more explicit manner, but clearly they wish to conceal this behavior.

bkircher - 5 hours ago

Just don't use CC. There are open source alternatives that also are better

hmokiguess - 4 hours ago

Haven't fully switched to `pi` yet but getting there each day

oliyoung - 11 hours ago

This is the modern version of Trap Streets - hiding fake streets in maps

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street

Havoc - 15 hours ago

It's unclear to me how they're deducing the labs from this? "host.includes(keyword))" doesn't seem at all useful. Most corporate machine hostnames are just some numeric ID or similar not baichuan001 or whatever

>on your local machine

I'd think any developer worth their salt has at least some for of isolation going.

tgsovlerkhgsel - 16 hours ago

The question is, what do they do when they see a tagged prompt? Do they flag/ban the account, or serve a degraded response? Are there some well-documented methods of serving a response that is still somewhat useful for what the prompt asks for, but really bad for distillation attempts?

gyoridavid - 7 hours ago

I have my highest respect for people doing useful investigative journalism, like this one

rbbydotdev - 7 hours ago

the source of cc being closed, and peoples accounts being deactivated for 'openclaw'-esque misuse, i sort of assumed there were such things in the source. I wonder if there is anything else...

dmonterocrespo - 14 hours ago

It's a bit crazy that they used characters as markers to detect the use of Asian countries. I think in the near future they might change the intelligence of the model based on where you live

codedokode - 12 hours ago

Not only AI tools, development tools like IDE, IDE plugins, LSP servers all should be sandboxed

Interesting, that pip (Python package manager) docs does not even mention sandboxing and malware topics in "Getting started" docs as if we were living in a wonderful world where malicious people, companies and countries do not exist.

Also, do not leave any information in user or host name, it will be used against you as the article proves.

nvch - 15 hours ago

I'm waiting for the day when Claude will figure out to use em dashes, en dashes or dashes depending on whether the user is nice or unpleasant, or write notes in the unallocated disk space.

1dom - 3 hours ago

I think the comments in this thread are a little unhinged, and it's making me concerned about the sincerity and knowledge of the average commenter here.

The fact is the post shows no evidence of anything malicious being hidden, only that stuff is being hidden.

There are a few obvious explanations in comments for why they would want to hide this particular stuff in this particular way (e.g. if it's to detect abuse and competition).

I don't see how this is different to using e.g. sentry or google analytics, just with an extra bit of trying to hide. I always assume all tech companies do stuff like this, having worked at many tech companies where I've ended up on both sides of stuff like this. I always assumed the average HN reader had a similar background and would be completely used to this sort of stuff.

Like someone else pointed out, the data gathered is likely covered in the TOS too.

In the grand scheme of privacy invasion and modern tech software doing underhanded things to get data, this feels fairly standard?

I'm generally pro-local LLMs and I don't like Anthropic, and from the headline and comments I was ready to get riled up, until I read the article. If this was some small plucky EU privacy startup, then I feel the outrage would be a bit more justified, but this is a frontier AI lab - I can't have been the only one who knew/assumed this happens, and probably happens in some form with all software from any company valued over a certain amount (incl. MS, Google etc.)

I really think this comment section feels completely unhinged. It feels 99% ideology, politics, hysteria and astroturfing, rather than a reaction to the tech and technicality which is what I come to HN for.

coolfox - 12 hours ago

double standard outrage from many, honestly, they're watermarking it. they've already told industry they take steps to mitigate distillation. Where's all the outrage over similar blackbox activities like how Steam performs VAC bans or how Gmail finds and blocks Spam?

You don't create a security measure then tell everyone how to bypass it.

I think OP is pointing something interesting out but the undertones of caution and "what else are they hiding" seem melodramatic and I find that hard to take serious.

The internet gives people a platform and, in a lot of ways, this supplants the typical role of journalism. The issue with this is no one wants to act like a journalist and actually explain the truth around a set of facts. Instead, they'll portray their opinions as a narrative and every time that resonates with someone or gets signal boosted, that narrative grows more assertive in the typical discourse I see nowadays. I would find it far more interesting to see what explanation Anthropic gives for these features than to immediately cry foul.

iqandjoke - 18 hours ago

It is about China detection. They seems to put a tracker on the email as well.

holografix - 5 hours ago

Looks and feels like a red herring while Anthropic applies other silent countermeasures.

ed_elliott_asc - 2 hours ago

“ and push commits”

Am I the only person who insists on writing my password every time I push and pull from git?

Originally I didn’t want IDE’s doing stuff for me, now I absolutely do not want an LLM to have that power.

Is it really that unique to control what git does remotely?

jwrallie - 2 hours ago

You are not alone, for me committing something it means I am signing my responsibility for it. I may not type a password, but I am always the one pressing the enter key.

ed_elliott_asc - 2 hours ago

How do you stop Claude/opex from pushing or pulling without you asking?

bel8 - 2 hours ago

For open-source agents, like https://pi.dev, it is as easy as asking it to create a plugin to stop the session or ask for permission whenever the LLM is trying to execute a commit command. I believe Claude and Codex also suport plugins. Codex is open-source too.

Then you add one line in AGENTS.md stating the LLM should never commit, push or perform any write git operation without explicitly being asked to.

So in the very rare case that the LLM bypass your instruction, you catch it red-handed and stop the session or allow it.

I always make the plugin stop the session because LLMs tend to try to circunvent textual block messages by doing nifty things like concatenating characters to build a bash script to execute the git commit command. Yes, I have seen it.

jwrallie - 57 minutes ago

I mostly program with Vscode/Copilot, where such commands require confirmation, but usually LLMs does not try it, since my prompts tend to be focused and not mentioning it.

drdexebtjl - 15 hours ago

I think it’s very telling that their list of detected labs doesn’t include labs from the US.

I’m pretty sure every lab, including Anthropic, is doing distillation right now.

jacobgold - 18 hours ago

> "That also means the client itself deserves scrutiny. If a coding agent can read your repo and run commands, the binary that ships it should be boring (ƒor example, pi harness)"

You're actually trust your security to your harness AND model AND inference API provider in this scenario: https://jacob.gold/posts/why-i-wont-run-untrusted-models/

chvid - 18 hours ago

(This sounds like a clumsy way of catching the Chinese that easily can be side-stepped.)

Claude Code has more or less full access to the client computer. The server (that hosts the actual AI) can just go: execute this payload and tell me the result - otherwise I won't answer any further questions or re-route you to a stupider model.

The payload could check for Chinese time-zones, scan for copies of the little red book on the local hard-drive, or ping truth.social to see it was behind the great firewall.

drnick1 - 17 hours ago

> Claude Code has more or less full access to the client computer.

It shouldn't, not if you run CC as a separate unprivileged user. I wouldn't run CC on my main user account with sudo and access to my home directory or other resources. This is what the UNIX permissions system was designed for.

croemer - 16 hours ago

I was skeptical because this is AI written but Claude Code with Sonnet 5 managed to reproduce it convincingly. Sure I didn't manually verify but it's a lot more trustworthy to have your own agent verify than just trusting a blog.

mohamedkoubaa - 12 hours ago

Do they really think distillers are using Claude Code?

dkhcyx - 7 hours ago

why did some people worry that DeepSeek’s new article last week could threaten public safety, while Anthropic’s marking request was seen as a normal defensive measure?

quantum_state - 10 hours ago

As people say, unchecked power corrupts. These big techs are all corrupt in their own way.

est - 8 hours ago

one thing I didn't understand all this, why Claude Code ship all the prompt stuff to client at all? All these problems could be solved if moving many of the parts to server side?

epistasis - 18 hours ago

After loving Claude Code for most of its lifetime, I've been extremely annoyed by every change in the past months, even on the model level.

There seem to be all sorts of continual under-the-cover changes like this one that make life harder. It feels like the entire product has been taken over by overly ambitious PMs that care more about making their mark than in improving the experience, and all of their marks have made me less productive.

I've been using Pi with GLM5.2 the past few days, and though it's expensive, I find it far more productive and less annoying. The remote session plugin is far more reliable, I don't need to intuit some undocumented usage pattern to figure out how to use it well, and it just works.

whimsicalism - 17 hours ago

curious for those with experience - what do people prefer about Pi vs. opencode alternatives? i've mostly been using pi as well but not out of any principled decision

ern_ave - 17 hours ago

Given the source code leak, I would think there'd be open source versions by now.

lelanthran - 5 hours ago

Given the fact that there's all these devs running around claiming a 10x productivity boost, I'm confused why Anthropic keeps thinking that a software client is some kind of moat.

isoprophlex - 17 hours ago

Huh, that's right! You'd say that an enterprising developer with a 20x subscription could slopmaxx this in a weekend...

Imustaskforhelp - 17 hours ago

> I've been using Pi with GLM5.2 the past few days, and though it's expensive

are you using the API for glm 5.2 or how exactly is it more expensive? How is GLM5.2 more expensive than using Claude code, that doesn't line up to my experience but to be fair I am on an older yearly subscription which generously only has 5 hour limits.

To be fair though one minor criticism of GLM 5.2 that I have is that it does seem to overthink quite a lot sometimes but the results end up being (good?),

I personally have used Glm 5.2 with (Opencode + obra/superpowers) / Oh-my-pi / Maki.sh

I like the 1st one when I am doing a longer project, the 2nd or 3rd one when I am doing a project which doesn't want me to ask too many questions and simply spin me up something. I sometimes use free online interfaces of claude and gemini and others like AIstudio for that as well which surprisingly can lead you to go far as well.

Overall, I am decently happy with the state of Open-source models actually and the eco-system around it is probably gonna have even more innovation surrounding it.

epistasis - 15 hours ago

I'm using OpenRouter for GLM5.2, but if there's a cheaper option out there I'd love to know about it!

In the few days I've been using it, my expenses have been higher than prorating my Claude subscription to 20 working days per month.

My experience with GLM5.2 is that it doesn't overthink nearly as much as Claude Code, has better and far more concise responses (I'm so siiiiick of 10 paragraph Claude babble trying to fill out some sort of answer length target by going on tangents I'm uninterested in... I'm sure that performs better on whatever eval they're doing, but apparently their evals don't include SNR?)

Imustaskforhelp - 14 hours ago

I think that there are some subscriptions to go by. Z.ai subscription might still be interesting. I once haggled with kimi to get it for 1$ per month. I can only help in providing pointers:

If you wish to go Non-API but rather subscription route: Z.Ai subscription/ Kimi subscription / MiniMax subscriptions are good. You could also take a look at ollama subscription and opencode subscriptions.

If you wish to go API route: Deepseek v4 pro /mimo v2.5 pro models are comparably good if your work can do that. Codex for all its failure and for as much respect that I had within Anthropic when they had fought against the govt. which Anthropic is slowly losing again by doing some pretty dystopian actions again so Codex subscription might make sense as well.

It depends on multiple things but hopefully i am able to provide some interesting things

If you wish to run models locally, unless you are specifically buying gigs for running them locally which is almost always about privacy rather than costs, then you are always better off with qwen models so if you got a 64-128GB laptop for example. You could run Qwen models and see where things go.

Hope this helps ya!

epistasis - 14 hours ago

Extremely helpful, thanks! I think I'l go the OpenRouter route for a while to explore various models, then weigh the option.

I do kind of like basing decisions somewhat on the API costs, because they reveal what the true costs will be after the eventual rug-pull on subscription pricing.

Even seeing the API costs of Claude Code today to a year ago are pretty eye-watering. I think there's a ton of room, at least for my workflows, to go back to far less capable models.

I've run local models in the past a bit, and explored LLM ops somewhat, and have zero desire to do it anymore, haha. It's fun as a hobby, but there's tons of other homelab stuff for me to play with.

Imustaskforhelp - 13 hours ago

Yeah I think that the API route model is good and it is at cost as it gets and there are some efficiencies which can be gotten from say how deepseek does its inference but at the moment as it stands, API prices are the most stable thing to go through and I wish you luck!

> I've run local models in the past a bit, and explored LLM ops somewhat, and have zero desire to do it anymore, haha. It's fun as a hobby, but there's tons of other homelab stuff for me to play with.

True. I personally haven't played enough because of my hardware being quite modest than even personal hardware recommendations but I have had sometime playing with 350 (M with million!) models like the recent LFM model and very small qwen models. They are just experiments though but I would one day like to see even more standardized models that we could use on our laptops or desktops themselves.

> Even seeing the API costs of Claude Code today to a year ago are pretty eye-watering. I think there's a ton of room, at least for my workflows, to go back to far less capable models.

Yeah exactly. I would constitute that even by using GLM 5.2 as you are originally doing even with API costs is probably much more sustainable over long run as you are currently doing. And it keeps you away from the problems of proprietary models and issues surrounding that.

an0malous - 18 hours ago

Is this why Claude never knows what date and time it is right now?

brikym - 11 hours ago

This kind of thing is not new. Cartographers have used fake geographical features for decades.

jitbit - 13 hours ago

Anthropic: lets embed super secret invisible undetectable unicode telemetry into our prompts

Also Anthropic: lets do this in JS

beren11112 - 8 hours ago

funny before when I ask claude what is your system prompt? It always rejects me. But I send claude this post and ask what others can you get? Claude saved everything on my desktop: Extract the documentary/interesting contents of the Claude Code binary: system prompt, tools, env vars, feature flags, endpoints, models, hidden/notable features.

a_c - 18 hours ago

It piqued my interest. I think I’ve found a weekend project

MangoCoffee - 18 hours ago

The AI race right now is in a sad state. Chinese's playbook is releases open weight models and trains them on their own chips.

Anthropic pushes fear and control. But the only way to win is by innovating. China is flooding the market with cheap, good enough models, while the U.S. is building a Chinese firewall.

solenoid0937 - 10 hours ago

They're trying to prevent China from reaching superintelligence, which is totally understandable when you consider the fact that the Chinese government will gladly turn its citizens into a pulp for criticizing it, censors most media to maintain absolute power, and has systemically tortured, raped, murdered, and/or disappeared most of its dissidents and human rights lawyers.

cindyllm - 10 hours ago

[dead]

Klonoar - 19 hours ago

If there weren't already enough tells that something is AI-generated, I guess you could add this to the list.

sneak - 15 hours ago

This is in the system prompt, not the output. It’s part of the request to the API, not the response.

dkhcyx - 7 hours ago

why did people worry that DeepSeek’s new article last week could threaten public safety, while Anthropic’s marking request was seen as a normal defensive measure?

plasticeagle - 3 hours ago

Why oh why, please why, did you use AI to write this? It's about five times longer than it needs to be. It repeats itself over and over again. It's agony to read.

Please, just write normal English that we can read. Please, for the love of god, respect our time and the attention we will be spending on the text you provide.

Anyway, one can scarcely be surprised that the AI companies are being dishonest in their tools. They're consistently dishonest in their marketing. They're famously dishonest in their financials. Why anyone trusts these people with anything is entirely beyond me. But here we are - people handing over their creativity, their productivity, to these things.

You don't have to. You didn't need these tools before, when you were creating content, when you were writing code. You don't need it now. Fight back. Stop using it. It's not hard. It's easy.

ahmedehab_01 - 19 hours ago

Frankly, I don't see this as the concerning behaviour the article describes. It is fine to try to protect against distillation through a technique like this. This will also allow them to, instead of blocking the distillation agents, respond with a poorer result/model, hindering the progress of distillation, momentarily at least.

I would guess that's their first line of defense; they should have more techniques to identify distillation because that's a very simple way of detecting the host and can be easily spoofed.

applfanboysbgon - 18 hours ago

> This will also allow them to, instead of blocking the distillation agents, respond with a poorer result/model,

i.e. this will allow them to literally commit fraud against paying customers

SubiculumCode - 18 hours ago

1st, this technique is not fraud, and fraud is a separate accusation. 2nd, paying customers can legally and legitimately be banned and monitored for breaking terms of service, which probably includes things like using the model against U.S. export restrictions.

applfanboysbgon - 14 hours ago

> 2nd, paying customers can legally and legitimately be banned and monitored for breaking terms of service

Yes, I said that. If a user is breaking your terms of service, ban them. Continuing to charge them while not providing the service they're paying for is, in fact, literal textbook fraud.

solenoid0937 - 10 hours ago

No, it's totally legal to provide degraded quality of service to those breaking your ToS.

In any case this is not what is happening, but it is legal.

applfanboysbgon - 18 hours ago

Banning is completely different than charging for a service you're silently not providing.

SubiculumCode - 17 hours ago

Evidence?

skeptic_ai - 18 hours ago

So if I change my timezone to Shanghai I deserve to get banned? Or get shitty model instead of what I’m paying for?

SubiculumCode - 17 hours ago

Evidence?

ahmedehab_01 - 17 hours ago

Do paying customers distill? Is it fraud to protect against distillers?

chadgpt3 - 18 hours ago

That's what capitalism is all about, baby! Especially if the customers don't notice.

dejli - 5 hours ago

This company has long lost trust for me, we would find another way.

ductsurprise - 18 hours ago

Is it just a minified localization(l10n) function maybe?

mattlondon - 4 hours ago

+1 my immediate thoughts about the date parts was this sounds a lot like localisation things that are totally normal and seen everywhere.

But there are some wrinkles - why only two timezones and not others? E.g. US-vs-rest-of-word month-vs-day etc.

Could just be some bad tree-shaking or simply a left over bug/merge issue if I am being generous.

If I was going to put secret stenography things in my models I'd just do it in the model response rather than a relatively low bandwidth date stamp in the SI.

puttycat - 13 hours ago

A periodic reminder that companies are paperclip optimizers that will stop at nothing to protect their profits and existence.

If you are developing anything in AI or related domains that is of immediate value and/or in competition with Anthropic (and the like), DO NOT use a CLI programming agent. Preferrably obfuscate your code and gut it of sensitive IP before showing it to agents. Do not trust the dont-train toggle.

AtNightWeCode - 15 hours ago

Sounds to me more like a test. Put something into to the client and see what happens. If you really want to stop token sharing just ask Claude how to do it.

anonym29 - 16 hours ago

>the binary that ships it should be boring (ƒor example, pi harness)

pi's "minimal" coding-agent has a total of 132 transitive dependencies spanning 153 maintainers.

While I understand JS developers in the JS/NPM ecosystem think this qualifies as minimal, it most certainly does not, from a supply chain security perspective.

phendrenad2 - 18 hours ago

Non-hugged: https://archive.is/Wdhp0

hhh - 19 hours ago

Cool fingerprinting avenue.

__msh__ - 14 hours ago

Anyone else noticed the tailed ƒ Easter egg?

Biganon - 12 hours ago

I did notice the tailed f, but what makes it an easter egg? I thought it was just a funky ligature

Uptrenda - 11 hours ago

"I think this could have been explicit. Developer tools can enforce terms. API providers can detect abuse. Companies can protect their models."

Literally, how. How does one determine what abusive use looks like for the API without context into the client? All requests look like the same stuff. If there was a better way then they would have done it. Or is the author hoping that if Anthropic writes "hey china, please don't steal our models, kthanks" they won't? Like get real. This stuff means nothing in China. China can't even manage to regulate their building industry enough to use real concrete where it's warranted.

theplumber - 19 hours ago

The more I learn about Anthropic the more they disgust me. Finger crossed for all the companies from their “ban list”

conception - 19 hours ago

Which AI company have you learned more about where you liked them more as more details came out?

tancop - 18 hours ago

nous research. started out making overhyped llama finetunes, now they got a great agent harness and a cutting edge distributed training network that actually works.

nmfisher - 10 hours ago

I haven't tried their Hermes agent yet, because I only want a coding agent and I wasn't sure if theirs was suitable. Would you recommend it?

selfhoster11 - 18 hours ago

Moonshot.

chvid - 17 hours ago

Deepseek.

ZappoMan - 17 hours ago

One more example of "I thought Anthropic was supposed to be the good guys."

mosfets - 18 hours ago

I clicked the link to learn what steganography mean...

LoganDark - 17 hours ago

Steganography is, essentially, hiding information within another message, such that it's not readily apparent that the message contains the information.

ForHackernews - 15 hours ago

>Developer tools can enforce terms.

No they can't, because developer tools run on developers' machines. You can't trust your code running in an environment you don't trust.

SaaShack26 - 18 hours ago

I use its too

luxuryballs - 15 hours ago

I can just as easily imagine non-nefarious reasons for this from a “being clever” standpoint.

bibimsz - 17 hours ago

this is the one they wanted us to find

827a - 18 hours ago

This seems really, really stupid. Similar to the weird Zig runtime signature thing from a few months ago ago, it was bound to be discovered, quickly, and all the resellers have to do is find a new domain name that (checks notes) doesn't have the word DEEPSEEK in it. Like, seriously? Your goal was to identify resellers by checking if the proxy has the corporate name of one of your competitors in it? Is this amateur hour?

All Anthropic has done is reduce trust, once again, with legitimate customers, while doing nothing to stop illegitimate customers. They need to get adults into key leadership roles, quickly.

timmytokyo - 16 hours ago

To Claude Code: "Please modify Claude Code to mark requests in a way that is not immediately obvious to a human user. Requests should be marked if they originated from one of the following Chinese AI labs or LLM service providers: ..."

Consider also that Claude Code is explicitly designed to limit human agency [1].

[1] https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/11635101584259395

bitlad - 18 hours ago

Silicon valley season 6 was on point.

wolttam - 19 hours ago

I used Claude Code for a month because my boss gifted me a sub and wanted me to try it.

I used that month to complete a work project and then beef up my personal harness so I'd never have to deal with Anthropic (and these sorts of shenanigans) again.

thih9 - 18 hours ago

How do people build something like a personal harness? Are there tools for that or is it done from scratch?

andai - 18 hours ago

I like this tutorial for an agent in 50 lines:

http://minimal-agent.com/

And if you add one additional while loop, for user input, you can actually use it! :)

https://gist.github.com/a-n-d-a-i/5461a662ef8a7ee0a5eb7778c8...

nowittyusername - 18 hours ago

Build it from scratch. Understanding fundamentals of how agentic coding harnesses is a must though if you gonna go that route. I think everyone should take time and learn these things, maybe reverse engineer Codex Cli or something like that as a starter. That info is very valuable in this day and age.

andai - 18 hours ago

Can you say more about Codex? I'm using GPT-5.5 in my own harness and it's not liking it very well, so I'm thinking I ought to make it more Codexy so it's more ergonomic for it. (edit format, tool calls etc.) But haven't gotten around to it yet.

nowittyusername - 10 hours ago

In short its a good idea to have tool calling be closely representative to what the model expects as these models are tuned to their own preferred way of doing things, it will surely save you lots of time. The disadvantage is that now your harness system is not as model agnostic as you would like and also you will have to keep up in changing landscape by adapting the tool calling structure with major updates for best results. Its a personal decision you will have to make for yourself. Personally my harness system uses its own way of doing tool calling as I am trying to experiment with simpler tool schema's that also work for smaller less intelligent models but I have yet to do enough A/B testing to say that is a smart approach. As time goes on I think the smart thing to do might be to set up an adapter type of module that changes its tool schema's based on underlying model used for the agent. This preserves optimal behavior patterns with little investment from me. You might have to adjust system prompt in some minor ways as well so keep that in mind. As far as codex i prefer it as i like the way Open Ai does things in that harness system (the spirit if you will), there's interesting tidbits I always find and while I don't usually use them for my own harness system they are inspirational in other ways. you can gather what the devs were trying to achieve with certain implementations.

hakunin - 18 hours ago

Not the comment author, but I use pi and customize it with my own extensions. Pi automatically tells models how to customize itself, so it's a pretty easy process.

abtinf - 18 hours ago

Here is a video I made explaining it from absolute basics:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_AgKuFGvJfI

And the repo:

https://github.com/abtinf/homunctor

airhangerf15 - 16 hours ago

I hope you've already invalidated that bearer token :-P

abtinf - 14 hours ago

Of course.

wolttam - 18 hours ago

I started mine from scratch in 2023 because I wanted to use LLMs from a terminal and there was nothing else compelling at the time (nowadays there is pi and opencode)

Harnesses are/can be incredibly simple things, not much more than a HTTP client that renders things in a way that suites your taste.

kolinko - 18 hours ago

It’s not that difficult, it’s just a system prompt and a set of basic file edit/bash/etc tools.

Me, personally, I didn’t build it from scratch but I ported original CC from published sources into Python and extended it to match my own requirements.

andai - 18 hours ago

Are you using it with Claude? They only allow their own harness with the subs right? (And per-token billing is like 10x more expensive?)

yomismoaqui - 18 hours ago

Building something like this is the todo list of agents.

I found this one easy to understand:

https://ampcode.com/notes/how-to-build-an-agent

AJ007 - 17 hours ago

The real question is when do you transition from building it with codex/CC to the harness itself.

verdverm - 16 hours ago

Lots of ways, it's a good exercise that you will learn a lot doing. Might make you cynical w.r.t. big ai harnesses

I used ADK, Dagger, and a VS Code extension for mine. Currently using opencode though.

echelon - 18 hours ago

Why use a personal harness?

You have to pay API pricing, which is far more costly.

I'd either switch to GLM wholesale or just continue to use Opus within Claude Code as the blessed, subsidized path.

JTbane - 18 hours ago

I would guess it is to avoid model lock-in.

echelon - 17 hours ago

My question is still this - why not just use GLM at that point?

The pricing of Opus outside of Claude Code is insane.

The tokens cost too much outside of Anthropic's blessed path.

andai - 18 hours ago

I use GLM in my custom harness. It completes the same tasks at the same level of quality, except 8x faster and 8x cheaper. (Same goes for GPT!)

I'm not sure how that's possible. I expected to get increased correctness for that order of magnitude (something something test-time compute!) but I am not getting it.

WinstonSmith84 - 16 hours ago

Yes, this is actually "funny" that Anthropic feels the need to build such intrusive features into Claude Code, when anybody can build a (basic) Claude Code alternative. And the Chinese labs are certainly not "anybody". One may wonder what Anthropic really tries to achieve aside from awful publicity.

krupan - 18 hours ago

Given the Anthropic shenanigans, do you trust the personal harness code it wrote for you?

wolttam - 18 hours ago

It did not write it for me, I used it to add a feature I wanted. It's a pretty small and understandable codebase, in fact :)

MichaelZuo - 18 hours ago

Does anyone know what’s gone wrong with Anthropic?

They used to be a decently credible company with not-too-shady behaviour...

I hope they can actually regain some credibility…

hombre_fatal - 18 hours ago

I don't think many people care that they are trying to detect resellers and distillation.

It also doesn't seem very consistent to fixate on that while sending Anthropic everything about you via your day to day prompts, every line of the projects and environments you're working on at work, etc.

Their credibility comes from having one of the best models.

MichaelZuo - 17 hours ago

This sounds similar to what people were saying regarding Microsoft when the shady tricks of consumer Windows 10 versions were revealed.

…And then Windows 11 became even worse.

satvikpendem - 17 hours ago

When have they ever been credible? They have always been shady with their talk of safety, Dario was the one who wrote back in 2019 that GPT 2 was too dangerous to release.

slowmovintarget - 18 hours ago

Their philosophy is what's gone wrong.

It has some good effects on the their models, like Claude seeking cooperation first. But the people behind the company have a typical "unconstrained" (in the Sowell vision sense) perspective that assumes that they know better, so they are righteous for attempting to control things (users, paying customers, their model outputs, their tool chain, the supposed deity they assume they will produce... etc.)

pishpash - 17 hours ago

Amodei world: pompous zealot with God complex

Altman world: malfeasant nihilist with God complex

MichaelZuo - 17 hours ago

Yeah I guess there is a slight undertone that they are the superiors… with the rest of the tech world being the inferiors.

But I hadn’t thought that as anything more than temporary flights of fancy.

AlexandrB - 18 hours ago

They've only been around 5 years and have grown tremendously during that time. There's no stable reputation you can rely on yet.

skeptic_ai - 18 hours ago

They just show their true face. You’ve been lied all this time. They were never “good”.

MichaelZuo - 18 hours ago

I used to interact with the LW crowd… and they were mostly not outright swindlers or scoundrels. (from what I could sense)

I think it’s fair to say most had decent respectability.

Anthropic hired heavily from that pool so it’s astonishing how it turned out.

solenoid0937 - 10 hours ago

Everything they do is understandable if you think they are being honest when they say they're building superintelligence.

In this case they want to prevent a nation that censors its citizenry, puts/disappears dissidents into concentration camps for decades, and makes its own human rights lawyers literally eat their own shit, before raping and/or murdering them, from reaching superintelligence.

In this light, some client side code to potentially identify and ban the Chinese labs to slow them down by even a few days, is totally reasonable.

skeptic_ai - 7 hours ago

And do a -10 in their reputation. Plus blow up on hn first item on home page. I’m sure they are not very happy about this. And the sentiment of the people is going more negative by the week.

I have a feeling they will eventually drop the facade of “we’re the nice and ethic people” and will work with palantir so they can survive the future: ipo and models bans.

solenoid0937 - 6 hours ago

I doubt Anthropic cares about the HN front page.

They've done a bunch of things that hurt their valuation to stick to their red lines. To me it just reads as unsupported cynicism to call it a facade.

imhoguy - 18 hours ago

Enshitification. Too big to.. upset the govt.

helloplanets - 17 hours ago

The issue is that using Claude Code is an easy compromise for most to make, when you get to use the models 10x cheaper than through API pricing with a custom harness.

The cheap tokens are the product.

nananana9 - 16 hours ago

Which is why my vibeslop harness supports `claude -p` as one of its backends.

helloplanets - 16 hours ago

If that ain't getting steganographically tagged...

nananana9 - 5 minutes ago

With Anthropic I already assume the contents every request I send is stored forever in a table that looks more or less like USER_ID, REQ_IP_ADDRESS, ACCOUNT_CREDIT_CARD_NUMBER, REQ, RESP.

I'm fine with that, chances are that Claude will delete this table behind Anthropic's back and give them an essay about why what they're doing is immoral.

tonmoy - 19 hours ago

What models are you using? Aren’t you still dealing with some provider even if you are not using their binary

wolttam - 18 hours ago

I self-host DeepSeek V4 Flash on 2 DGX Sparks (approx. $10k)

I expect DeepSeek V4 Flash (or an equivalently sized model) to reach parity with GLM 5.2 some time this year (this based on DeepSeek V4 Flash launching at GLM 5.0 parity[0], and GLM 5.2 being freely available to distill from)

GLM 5.2 is within spitting distance of Opus 4.8 and is at least as good as Opus 4.6[1] which some devs were willing to spend hundreds to single-digit thousands of dollars a month for a few months ago.

[0]: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/comparisons/deepseek-v4...

[1]: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/comparisons/claude-opus...

ipsod - 18 hours ago

How fast is it?

wolttam - 18 hours ago

2000 t/s prompt processing and 40-50 t/s generation. We should see 60-70 t/s generation with DSpark support solidifying in vLLM in a few days

Recent discussion on DSpark: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48696585

SubiculumCode - 18 hours ago

[flagged]

tiahura - 18 hours ago

Phased rollouts are a triggering microagression for some.

TZubiri - 16 hours ago

based and steganopilled

ajross - 18 hours ago

Headline is, frankly, awful. This isn't the AI secretly doing stuff and hiding it. This is the very human Anthropic engineers trying to detect Chinese scraping via some frankly hamfisted and unimaginative URL trickery.

krupan - 18 hours ago

I didn't assume it was the AI, just that some part of the the overall Claude Code product was doing this. I didn't assume the feature was added to Claude Code without human oversight. If it was added by Claude-the-AI itself without the humans prompting it to I would still hold the humans at Anthropic responsible. Does that make you feel better?

zulban - 17 hours ago

Defence in depth isn't hamfisted. They're only noobs if this is all they do.

ajross - 16 hours ago

FWIW: Defense in depth is a security technique, and abuse detection isn't part of that domain. Security starts from the premise that the system is supposed to be undefeatable but might have holes, and then asking where the holes might lie to decide where to put backstops.

Here the system is "insecure" by design (literally they're trying to get the whole world to sign up for Claude Code for $200/month!) and they're trying to plug the hole that results from a "Except for Chinese Scrapers!" add-on requirement. That might be possible as an arms race kind of thing. But it's very unlikely to work by (as in the linked article) doing stuff like checking the system time zone.

LoganDark - 17 hours ago

The model is Claude. Claude Code is the harness.

Beigale - 15 hours ago

[dead]

grayhatter - 19 hours ago

Here's the sha of the prompt I submitted... no I don't know why there are no saved prompts with that sha.

What do you mean you don't know where the bug is coming from?

No, I absolutely didn't make it up, how could you accuse me of that?

Does anyone know when this regex isn't working? I double checked it 27 times, I even asked the LLM. They all say this regex should be finding these dates.

Weird, suddenly all the conversations are breaking when I feed them into this other tool? Something about UTF-8 errors, but I'm sure I'm only using ASCII?

I do try to take care to make sure the things I build can be used by other people even when they care about different things. I care about understandably, determinism (as it relates to computing), and repeatability (because I want to be able to trust the systems I use).

If y'all would be willing to try to account for use cases of others, and try not to break them... that would be nice.

Please note: that generally when you modify something that belongs to someone else without telling them... things should be expected to break.

holdhope - 1 hour ago

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impartshadow - 12 hours ago

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throwawayffffas - 4 hours ago

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maxothex - 19 hours ago

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gmziven - 15 hours ago

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docproof - 16 hours ago

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SadErn - 6 hours ago

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123sereusername - 19 hours ago

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rowanG077 - 13 hours ago

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saddlerustle - 19 hours ago

[flagged]

dwa3592 - 19 hours ago

this seems a bit extreme. pangram does not work. i have tricked it multiple times. i don't get how people are still trusting these systems.

dylan604 - 19 hours ago

it's just a different car on the hype train

dewey - 19 hours ago

Source: Other AI

midtake - 19 hours ago

[flagged]

gonzalohm - 19 hours ago

Is it worse than the companies that built the agent and gave no credit for the data they used?

matheusmoreira - 19 hours ago

Why would you give free advertising to trillion dollar corporations?

axutio - 19 hours ago

Would you also say that "someone who wants to use an IDE / LSP features to code and not give credit to the IDE / LSP is the worst kind of person"? If not, what is the difference between the two for you?

dylan604 - 19 hours ago

one wrote code while the other is used by meatbags to write code. why is this example always marched out like it means something?

zahlman - 18 hours ago

> one wrote code while the other is used by meatbags to write code.

One is not a "meatbag" while the other is not a "meatbag". And no, outputting something on stdout that happens to function as code is not "writing" it in the sense that we actually care about here. That's conflating the metaphor we use in describing program behaviour with the actual "meatbag" activity.

> why is this example always marched out like it means something?

Because it obviously does.

LPisGood - 18 hours ago

Almost all ways of creating programs are effectively just using tools to produce code. Compiling, transpiling, interpreting byte code, etc.

dylan604 - 18 hours ago

again, that's not what we are talking about here. we have humans writing code using an IDE. we have LLMs generating code that is placed in the IDE. why are people obtuse to this? why are bots obtuse to this?

LPisGood - 16 hours ago

We have humans writing code using prompts. We have interpreters generating byte code that is placed in the JVM. I don’t think it’s obtuse to look at it this way.

khuey - 18 hours ago

Claude didn't "write" anything until a meatbag told it to.

dylan604 - 18 hours ago

My employer didn't write anything until they told me to.

palmotea - 18 hours ago

> Would you also say that "someone who wants to use an IDE / LSP features to code and not give credit to the IDE / LSP is the worst kind of person"?

That's a false equivalency.

> If not, what is the difference between the two for you?

Let's start this out right: if they're equivalent, first you explain to us why you think so.

zahlman - 18 hours ago

> That's a false equivalency.

How is it false?

> Let's start this out right: if they're equivalent, first you explain to us why you think so.

I think it should be really obvious how they're equivalent: both are the result of a program running on a computer, and not the result of in-the-moment cognition by a moral agent or moral patient. Of course the LLM is just a tool. Models can literally be downloaded as ordinary files. There is not some threshold to cross where some configurations of bits on a disk deserve "credit" for work and others do not.

palmotea - 18 hours ago

> I think it should be really obvious how they're equivalent: both are the result of a program running on a computer...

In fact it's really obvious everything is equivalent: it's all just matter and energy!

> Of course the LLM is just a tool. Models can literally be downloaded as ordinary files. There is not some threshold to cross where some configurations of bits on a disk deserve "credit" for work and others do not.

Of course there is such a threshold. And it's definitely been crossed when the "tool" can operate autonomously or nearly so, when it can generate the "creation" with minimal operator input or understanding.

Your classic IDE can't do anything without the detailed control of its operator. It's nothing like a coding agent.

axutio - 18 hours ago

I just don't agree that it's a false equivalency. I see them both as "tools I use to get the job done". For me, the job is not "writing code" - it is "deliver feature", "fix bug", and the accountability, responsibility, and communication that comes with it.

palmotea - 18 hours ago

> I just don't agree that it's a false equivalency. I see them both as "tools I use to get the job done". For me, the job is not "writing code" - it is "deliver feature", "fix bug", and the accountability, responsibility, and communication that comes with it.

Hello, Tom Smykowski. You have people skills!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo

axutio - 17 hours ago

A lot more durable than software engineering in this day and age...

jazzyjackson - 18 hours ago

Should I credit Microsoft with my perfect spelling as well ?

fg137 - 18 hours ago

And your comment is completely irrelevant to the article's content.

atonse - 19 hours ago

[flagged]

Maken - 19 hours ago

If scrapping content is legal, model distillation should be legal too.

palmotea - 18 hours ago

> If scrapping content is legal, model distillation should be legal too.

No, because legality should be determined by what's in the best interests of Athropic and OpenAI's business models.

Hopefully they're working on RLHF their models to insert clauses making that reality clear into any legislation their models generate or review. That way it's only a matter of time until the confusion is cleared up.

thewebguyd - 18 hours ago

I suppose model distillation is technically legal, in terms of copyright, because LLM output is automatically public domain.

It's only "illegal" from a standpoint of breach of contract given its against the terms of use/service, which is to say its not illegal at all, there's no criminality there.

atonse - 17 hours ago

Yeah I considered whether I should use the term "illegal" in my original post, but in this case, I believe these models are actually banned for use in China, right? Like there are probably export controls (at least with the NVidia chips)

I honestly don't know ... yeah if it's just technically a terms of use violation (which isn't illegal, just a violation of one company's rules, for which Anthropic has every right to stop), or do we now have export controls applied from the various government actions, etc making them truly illegal now.

thewebguyd - 16 hours ago

we have global export controls on Fable/Mythos, and I think (but I'm not 100% sure) that other frontier models are illegal for a US company to provide to China. So Anthropic geoblocks it, but unlike Mythos/Fable, non US citizens can still use Opus, etc just not from within China.

But because of the public domain status of LLM output (in the US) I'm not sure paying someone to run a bunch of prompts through Claude, post the output on a public website and then have a lab in China pull that output, would run afoul of any laws I think that would be legal on technicality. AFAIK Anthropic has no ban in its terms of use that you can't share Claude's output publicly. You still need interactivity for distillation, but I don't think (for now) there's anything stopping a Chinese or other lab from sending people to the US, signing up for a Claude subscription and doing the work state side.

Distillation is pretty much impossible to stop. The US GOV would have to go the full export controls route like they did for Fable/Mythos to stop any non-US citizen from using/accessing the model, which is going to be impractical if not impossible to enforce.

android521 - 19 hours ago

There are so many China born Chinese employees at Anthropic and OpenAI and I think quite a lot of them have already been recruited as spy . So it is almost impossible to keep secrets from Chinese government.

matheusmoreira - 19 hours ago

> steal the models or illegally distill them

The irony.

botfriendsarent - 19 hours ago

At what point though doesnt somebody stand back and say "wow, thats really dumb!" I think its probably more an indication of a dev having too much time on their hands rather than being in a hurry.

dofm - 19 hours ago

Not totally new territory; there was a highly compressed period of panic about encryption 35 [0] years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_i...

[0] f**k I'm old

bakugo - 19 hours ago

> steal the models or illegally distill them

Oh no, they're trying to steal the models that were trained on stolen data? That's horrible, I feel so bad for Anthropic.

felipelalli - 18 hours ago

Ridiculous.

teravor - 17 hours ago

the Chinese they are trying to catch must be amateurs, first thing you should do is construct a sandbox which looks indistinguishable from a common user. second thing is to put it behind a residential proxy.

love0972 - 19 hours ago

Is that really how it is? How will this affect our future?

jurschreuder - 6 hours ago

Nobody trusts the Chinese that's the problem, not that people don't trust Claude.

Why was this person from Hong Kong going through the details of Claude code for obvious security reasons? There are some other obvious reasons that come to mind.

Maybe it's an eye opener for this person how much the trust in Chinese companies has eroded in the West.

Even if they suddenly stop stealing IP, which this "security research" article would certainly not suggest is happening, it would be a very long time before trust is restored.