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Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

reuters.com

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Re: Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

#51

[flagged]

Becoming? We've moved entirely in the opposite direction. When these tools first appeared the overwhelming conversation was about the risk of letting a remote tool siphon your code and intellectual property (where eventually they're going to add that to their training). Now everyone is using them, and that fear seems to have dissolved. Every corporation is sprinkled with Claude Code, Antigravity, Copilot, Codex, and…

> and that fear seems to have dissolved

Until the first big incident, yes.

Re: Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

#53

[flagged]

> Translation: Alibaba will continue distillation attacks using accounts that aren't directly attributable to it's own corporate infrastructure. What's a "distillation attack"? How is it different from simply distillation?

It's pretty much the same as when "installing programs on your computer" is called "sideloading". Deliberately deceptive, weaponized language to make it seem like a bad thing.

Re: Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

#54

[flagged]

Becoming? We've moved entirely in the opposite direction. When these tools first appeared the overwhelming conversation was about the risk of letting a remote tool siphon your code and intellectual property (where eventually they're going to add that to their training). Now everyone is using them, and that fear seems to have dissolved. Every corporation is sprinkled with Claude Code, Antigravity, Copilot, Codex, and…

> there is incredibly little interest in most orgs code

I think from a commercial perspective yes, but access to source code is very good for finding exploits which could be very valuable for governments. I could also see a future where companies are directly cyber-attacking competitors in hostile markets too...

Re: Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

#55
All remote AI are a massive security risk for individuals/companies/governments that may be targeted by the US government.

It is likely that the US will get a live feed from each AI provider that they are inspecting in real time to identity things of interest, terrorist attacks or foreign government planning or even foreign companies competitive to key US companies.

It will give them access to the though process in those companies as well as much of their text-based IP (source code, docs, meeting transcripts, etc)

Also if you are using local AI that you didn’t train yourself you can never be sure it doesn’t have purposeful biases in its reasoning that may disadvantage you - such as directing you away from certain plans or ideas or patents etc.

Re: Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

#56
post #27

[flagged]

Wasn't one of the big promises the AI labs made "uncopyrighting"? Ie. the ability to reconstruct large works, including source code, without actual access to the source code? Everything from movies to operating systems.

Cleverly compressing and decompressing doesn't de-copyright it. ... and if it's not the same who'd trust it.

Re: Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

#57
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe if they didn’t farm all the data from Claude to train their own trash models. Anthropic wouldn’t feel the need to do it.

Anthropic stole the entire internet. Excuse my language, but they can fuck right off.

The issue here is not whether Anthropic used Common Crawl, Alibaba also does that.

The issue is that by distilling Claude, Alibaba reuses the IP anthropic used to train the model that's more akin to historical Chinese reverse engineering methods and disrespect of IP

Re: Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

#58
post #41
post #12

What Claude Code did is absolutely mindboggling tho, if Chinese harness did that probably POTUS would lose sleep.

It seemed pretty mild compared to what's collected by modern websites and apps, though? How many don't know your Timezone?

> How many don't know your Timezone?

The timezone fetch was to alter program behaviour at runtime, not to send arbitrary timezones for tracking reasons.

It was one way of detecting if it was a chinese person using the program and then behaving differently.

Malware behaves this way. STUXNET for example was wired to do nothing except propagate unless the environment had the right conditions.

Re: Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

#59
post #57
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic stole the entire internet. Excuse my language, but they can fuck right off.

The issue here is not whether Anthropic used Common Crawl, Alibaba also does that. The issue is that by distilling Claude, Alibaba reuses the IP anthropic used to train the model that's more akin to historical Chinese reverse engineering methods and disrespect of IP

Anthropic clearly doesn't respect other people's IP, it's real rich that they now insist on theirs being worthy of protection.

Fwiw, I think the concept of IP in general is counter to human progress.

Re: Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

#60
post #31

[flagged]

The corollary is that there are no morals once the stakes are in the $ billions, let alone hundreds of billions.

This isn't even about a single person or personality. Very few people in such position could stand fast by their moral code. In any case, an environment that favors profit above everything will naturally select for individuals who are unencumbered by such hindrances.

There might've been 100s of Altmans and Amodeis who had a strong moral code but we don't know about them because they dropped out of the "race" because of said moral hurdles.

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