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…
I finally bought Claude Pro (I am not coding etc these days so I just wanted to try it). The Claude desktop app is downright pathetic. I mean they could write a better one just with their own LLMs. What's stopping them?
Claude Code is steganographically marking requests
171–180 of 817 posts
Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests
#172Headline is, frankly, awful. This isn't the AI secretly doing stuff and hiding it. This is the very human Anthropic engineers trying to detect Chinese scraping via some frankly hamfisted and unimaginative URL trickery.
Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
1st, this technique is not fraud, and fraud is a separate accusation. 2nd, paying customers can legally and legitimately be banned and monitored for breaking terms of service, which probably includes things like using the model against U.S. export restrictions.
Banning is completely different than charging for a service you're silently not providing.
Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
1st, this technique is not fraud, and fraud is a separate accusation. 2nd, paying customers can legally and legitimately be banned and monitored for breaking terms of service, which probably includes things like using the model against U.S. export restrictions.
So if I change my timezone to Shanghai I deserve to get banned? Or get shitty model instead of what I’m paying for?
Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests
#175Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests
#176Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
If scrapping content is legal, model distillation should be legal too.
I suppose model distillation is technically legal, in terms of copyright, because LLM output is automatically public domain. It's only "illegal" from a standpoint of breach of contract given its against the terms of use/service, which is to say its not illegal at all, there's no criminality there.
I honestly don't know ... yeah if it's just technically a terms of use violation (which isn't illegal, just a violation of one company's rules, for which Anthropic has every right to stop), or do we now have export controls applied from the various government actions, etc making them truly illegal now.
Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests
#178Frankly, I don't see this as the concerning behaviour the article describes. It is fine to try to protect against distillation through a technique like this. This will also allow them to, instead of blocking the distillation agents, respond with a poorer result/model, hindering the progress of distillation, momentarily at least. I would guess that's their first line of defense; they should have more techniques to ide…
> This will also allow them to, instead of blocking the distillation agents, respond with a poorer result/model, i.e. this will allow them to literally commit fraud against paying customers
Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why use a personal harness? You have to pay API pricing, which is far more costly. I'd either switch to GLM wholesale or just continue to use Opus within Claude Code as the blessed, subsidized path.
I would guess it is to avoid model lock-in.
The pricing of Opus outside of Claude Code is insane.
The tokens cost too much outside of Anthropic's blessed path.