Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

thereallo.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 817 posts

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#291

Post by bayindirh »

gleenn wrote: post #279
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…

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.

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.

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#292

Post by ifwinterco »

meowface wrote: post #195
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.

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.)

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

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#293

Post by computerex »

overgard wrote: post #182
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…

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.

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

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#294

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

epistasis wrote: post #264
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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!

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#295

Post by cowl »

gleenn wrote: post #279
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…

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.

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?

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#296

Post by NewsaHackO »

drdexebtjl wrote: post #250
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.

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 c…

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.

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#297

Post by fartcoin67 »

yard2010 wrote: post #289
loufe wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

[dead]

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#298

Post by epistasis »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #294
epistasis wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 ro…

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.

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#299

Post by cowboy_henk »

gleenn wrote: post #279
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…

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.

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.

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#300

Post by computerex »

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…

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.
Post reply on HN