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Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

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Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#231

Post by civet_java »

mrshadowgoose wrote: post #215

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.

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.

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#233

Post by verdverm »

thih9 wrote: post #70
wolttam wrote: post #36

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.

How do people build something like a personal harness? Are there tools for that or is it done from scratch?

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.

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#234

Post by maxwellg »

> 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.

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#235

Post by scottyah »

VortexLain wrote: post #56

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.

"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.

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#236

Post by airhangerf15 »

abtinf wrote: post #136
thih9 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do people build something like a personal harness? Are there tools for that or is it done from scratch?

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

I hope you've already invalidated that bearer token :-P

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#237

Post by anonym29 »

>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.

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#238

Post by civet_java »

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.

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#239

Post by scottyah »

civet_java wrote: post #225
edude03 wrote: post #160

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 obscu…

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 har…

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?

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#240

Post by WinstonSmith84 »

wolttam wrote: post #36

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.

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.
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