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Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

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Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#311

Post by filoleg »

bayindirh wrote: post #291
gleenn wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fai…

> 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).

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#312

Post by kordlessagain »

dools wrote: post #309
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.

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

To write distillation code, for one thing.

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#313

Post by bayindirh »

filoleg wrote: post #311
bayindirh wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fai…

> 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).

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.

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#314

Post by someonebaggy »

dkersten wrote: post #271
anon373839 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#316

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

epistasis wrote: post #298
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#317

Post by zaphirplane »

bayindirh wrote: post #291
gleenn wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fai…

> 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

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#318

Post by [deleted] »

bayindirh wrote: post #291
gleenn wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fai…

[deleted]

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#320

Post by nixosbestos »

sebastiennight wrote: post #194
nixosbestos wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

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.

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