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
Claude Code is steganographically marking requests
511–520 of 817 posts
Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests
#512There 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…
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 /?
Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests
#513Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
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.
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.
Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests
#514Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not illegal to distil the traces, but it is also not illegal for them to try to stop it.
Imagine an electricity generating company saying that they don't allow their electricity to be used to cold start a competitor's generator.
Do you think software should be regulated as a utility?
Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests
#515After 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…
Given the source code leak, I would think there'd be open source versions by now.
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.
Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests
#516Earlier quoted context omitted.
> that training on [lawfully obtained] copyrighted works falls under fair use Fixed that for you.
Were the copyright owners contacted prior to this lawful obtaining that you speak of? Or after?
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.
Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests
#517Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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
Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests
#518Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests
#519> 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 ste…
Seriously, the author has clearly never had to deal with client abuse. This is a total non issue unless you are Chinese distilling lab.
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.)
Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests
#520There 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.
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.