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Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

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Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#261

Post by anon373839 »

civet_java wrote: post #238

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 thou…

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.

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#264

Post by epistasis »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #199
epistasis wrote: post #156

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 m…

> 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 ov…

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?)

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#265

Post by phoghed »

nomel wrote: post #244
Terr_ wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 t…

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?

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#266

Post by novaleaf »

meowface wrote: post #92

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 o…

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...

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#267

Post by civet_java »

scottyah wrote: post #239
civet_java wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#268

Post by ericfr11 »

meowface wrote: post #92

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 o…

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

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#270

Post by sscaryterry »

mcmcmc wrote: post #189
overgard wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

This will most definitely be walked back.
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