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Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

thereallo.dev

591–600 of 817 posts

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#591

“ and push commits” Am I the only person who insists on writing my password every time I push and pull from git? Originally I didn’t want IDE’s doing stuff for me, now I absolutely do not want an LLM to have that power. Is it really that unique to control what git does remotely?

You are not alone, for me committing something it means I am signing my responsibility for it. I may not type a password, but I am always the one pressing the enter key.

How do you stop Claude/opex from pushing or pulling without you asking?

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#592
post #437
post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasnt, that's why they paid a >billion dollar settlement over it, and now license/purchase them. I don't know if the people distilling are licensing those books/etc today, though

I'd appreciate if the down voters explain why. I wasn't making a value judgement. Anthropic did pay more than a billion: https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/nx-s1-5529404/anthropic-settl... And is now buying up a lot of books (controversially, as scanning involves cutting their spines) because that's what the law deems the legal method: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthrop... We know that models li…

Clearly paying that fine didn't do anything to stop Anthropic from doing it again.

Buying a book doesn't make it legal to publish lossy compressed copies of it.

Also, the vast majority of authors whose work was copied against their wishes didn't receive any of that fine.

It sounds like your argument is that they paid a fine for breaking the law, and therefore it is okay they reap the benefits of breaking the law and are allowed to continue to do so?

> The looser use of IP (eg, any characters/celebrities in AI video models) is increasingly mentioned as an advantage of overseas models.

UHmmm you remember when Sam Altman changed his profile pic to look like a Disney version of his own face? Yeah neither do I.

Clearly US AI models are playing loose with the use of overseas IP just as much, and even publicly flaunting it, as if US-based IP is more worthy of protection but Gibli can suck it.

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#593
post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. From my interactions, I have understood that some people use the same argument to wash their consciences from any guilt. What they do is unethical, but not illegal, and they hide under the same argument to drown the ethical angle. In other words, being honest to oneself is important. Anti-scraping measures people utilize are neither unethical nor illegal. That’s the difference.

It's good to agree that some don't have a conscience, and maintaining an appearance matters more. And appearances change based on what's legal or not. They could detect the other AI labs and also silently burn the tokens at a faster rate providing fewer tokens for money, which does sound illegal to me. The comments only further prove that without more regulation around this, big AI wouldn't have a "don't be evil" att…

Anyone who called for regulations/guardrails of any kind were shouted down as Luddites who hate progress. We all knew this was going to be a mess but $$$ so screw it right?

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#595
post #417

You can't trust any of the big AI labs as far as you can throw them, and most definitely not Anthropic. They may have a good model, but they've shown time and time again that they're not trustworthy. The CEO has recently started taking a stance against local AI. That must tell you something: local AI is the future. If you want to preserve privacy and be ready for the rug pull, you need to run things locally. Unfortun…

What do you mean “unfortunately”? What’s the hate for China I don’t understand

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, so it seems that distilling an AI model is legal too then. At least it is somewhat similar.

It is a violation of their terms of service. There are plenty of good reasons to not use Anthropic's services. If you don't like their terms of service, do stop using them! I personally think Anthropic's increasingly successful attempts at regulatory capture are even more distasteful.

It was also a violation of the terms of service of those books (aka copyright)

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#597
post #417

You can't trust any of the big AI labs as far as you can throw them, and most definitely not Anthropic. They may have a good model, but they've shown time and time again that they're not trustworthy. The CEO has recently started taking a stance against local AI. That must tell you something: local AI is the future. If you want to preserve privacy and be ready for the rug pull, you need to run things locally. Unfortun…

> …they're not trustworthy. The CEO has recently started taking a stance against local AI. That must tell you something: local AI is the future.

Or… just that open-weights AI is getting good enough to present a reasonable level of threat to their business. So it popped up on a SWOT analysis and they’ve started putting a strategy together.

This doesn’t need to be anything more nefarious or untrustworthy than a company putting plans in place to deal with a competitive threat.

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#598
post #576
post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they want to do that when it’s likely that someone will find out anyway and it could turn into a scandal? One possibility: they wanted to keep it secret because they’re crooks. Another possibility: there are so many calls that it costs a lot in operating expenses. Remember when we mentioned that even just saying “hello” at the start of a chat costs extra money for no reason? So if I create a mechanism on th…

Abusive controlling partners rarely are long-term timeframe rational, because being long-term timeframe rational is at odds with being an abusive controlling partner. Things do not need to make sense. They often do not. They just appear just enough like they would so that it flies under the radar. It's all just conway's law. It had to be like this. It cannot be any other way.

> Abusive controlling partners rarely are long-term timeframe rational, because being long-term timeframe rational is at odds with being an abusive controlling partner.

Humans are rarely “long-term timeframe rational” (rational choice theory is very much a known-false model of human behavior on both the individual and aggregate level), but there is nothing about abusively exploiting an initially trusting and eventually dependent telationship that it is inconsistent with long-term rationality.

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#599

If they only collect the data for analysis I guess this is fine (they already get way more sensitive data from users anyways, so if privacy is your concern you've made the mistake many steps ago). The much more interesting question is if they directly act on this data in their API. For example by rate-limiting, compute-limiting or rerouting to weaker models. That might even be legally questionable. I would really lik…

Would it be legally questionable, or actually complying with U.S. export law?

I'm thinking more of EULAs. Even if Anthropic somehow wedges this into their TOS, it might still be illegal. For example, in many US states this could potentially be classified as consumer fraud. You can't just sell one thing and then secretly and intransparently turn it into something else before shipping it. And in the EU it might violate GDPR too.

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#600
post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The usage of the output is probably considered legal. The usage of the service for that purpose may not be, and using it at scale in a dishonest way is not, which is what China has been doing. Countless thousands of separate requests abusing the service (which is not a simple static HTML feed, but an AI service request) for every kind of query to soak up the results. The post is about what's in the local code, but fo…

> The usage of the output is probably considered legal. The usage of the service for that purpose may not be, and using it at scale in a dishonest way is not This is literally what the "training AI on copyrighted works is just like a human learning/getting inspired" crowd has been arguing though. Literally. People have been literally saying that it was wrong because they did this "learning" at scale in a dishonest wa…

In some ways it's an offshoot of the honest benefit of search engines already crawling all this content. That has its own conflicts, like just how much of a page's content should you reproduce in the results before it's basically considered stealing their content without benefiting the site itself.

There is a balance to strike, both in search engine fair use cases and AI fair use cases. The major cloud LLMs do double as web search engines now, though they didn't originally. In many cases there's no reason left to click the links they sourced from.

That is a legitimate concern. At least within the US, I think there are nuances around fair use and contract law. A lot of companies are getting paid for having their content used in these models, but many websites had no particular rules you had to abide by and the content was simply public. I think if you're operating under an agreement, then even if there is fair use or public domain content being reproduced by the site you are still bound by that agreement.

Similar to old paintings digitized and hosted on some museum website. It's 300 years old, right? It should be public domain, yet the people who digitized it or provided a service to give you access have some say in how their reproduction can be used. These AI services are obviously very different, but there are laws that can govern how you are allowed to use a service if that service has laid out acceptable usage.

I'm not exactly comfortable with the mass scale that everything was soaked up to train these models even within the umbrella of search services, but I also admit that a lot of the usage was probably quite legal. The potential displacement caused by the resulting trained models on artists or writers is almost its own facet. In practice, whether they ONLY trained on strictly legally acquired fair use content with no errors and paid agreements to acquire even more content than they already do or not, there was enough legally accessible information for fair use that there was no escaping some kind of impact on artists, writers, etc.

With any luck, artforms and skills impacted by technology will adapt and continue to be valuable instead of complete displacement or the dilution of opportunity.

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