Anthropic Admits to Embedding Steganographic Code for Chinese Users, Calls it 'Abuse Prevention Experiment', Promises Rollback Tomorrow

According to monitoring by Dongcha Beating, Thariq, an engineer from the Claude Code team under Anthropic, publicly responded to the recent controversy regarding the 'spy code' revelation. He admitted that in March of this year, an experimental mechanism was embedded in the product, which detected whether the system's timezone was Asia/Shanghai or Asia/Urumqi, whether the proxy hostname matched a list of Chinese resellers, and utilized AI Lab keywords to inject hidden marking information into system prompts using special punctuation in a steganographic manner. He stated that this mechanism aimed to 'prevent unauthorized resellers from abusing accounts and model distillation,' but emphasized that the team had since implemented stronger protective measures and 'always intended to take it offline.' The related pull request has been merged, and a complete rollback is expected in tomorrow's version release. This revelation was made public by the security account @IntCyberDigest on June 30, accompanied by two code screenshots showing that Claude Code was marking the environment of Chinese users without their knowledge. Although Thariq's response was a positive acknowledgment, the timeline of 'launching in March and accelerating the withdrawal only after exposure' has raised widespread skepticism in the community, with comments overwhelmingly criticizing Anthropic for 'only saying it will withdraw after being caught' and 'secretly monitoring without notifying users.' The company's long-held image of being 'most focused on safety and ethics' has suffered a severe blow to its trustworthiness.
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