Anthropic Removes Hidden Claude Code Tracker After Researchers Raise Privacy Concerns

Anthropic has eliminated a hidden monitoring system from Claude Code after a safety researcher found the AI coding assistant was utilizing undisclosed markers to determine some customers’ location, proxy use, and doable hyperlinks to Chinese language AI labs.

The characteristic, discovered in June by developer “Thereallo,” embedded indicators in Claude Code’s system prompts that would flag customers Anthropic believed had been bypassing restrictions or trying to extract mannequin capabilities.

“Anthropic most likely desires to detect API resellers, unauthorized Claude Code gateways, and mannequin ‘distillation assault’ pipelines,” Thereallo wrote. “A customized ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL pointing at a recognized reseller area is a helpful sign. A hostname containing deepseek or zhipu can be a helpful sign.”

Thereallo mentioned Anthropic’s try to detect resellers, unauthorized Claude Code gateways, and potential distillation assaults made sense, however criticized the way it was executed, noting that Claude Code hid monitoring indicators inside system prompts utilizing Unicode markers and encoded area lists somewhat than disclosing the system by means of documentation or launch notes.

“This isn’t a malicious characteristic, however it’s a bizarre alternative for a developer software that asks for belief,” Thereallo wrote.

After the tracker was revealed on-line, Anthropic engineer Thariq Shihipar mentioned on X that it was launched in March as an “experiment” to cease account abuse by unauthorized resellers and shield Claude from distillation assaults.

“The workforce has landed stronger mitigations since then and we’ve truly been that means to take this down for some time,” Shihipar wrote final week. “We merged the [pull request] and this ought to be totally rolled again in tomorrow’s launch.”

The information comes as Anthropic has stepped up warnings about AI mannequin distillation, the place one system’s outputs are used to coach one other mannequin. Whereas the follow is frequent in AI analysis, on the subject of geopolitics, distillation turns into a national security concern. Earlier this month, Alibaba banned workers from utilizing Claude Code, calling the software “high-risk” software program over safety issues.

In February, Anthropic accused Chinese language AI builders DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax of utilizing fraudulent accounts to extract hundreds of thousands of Claude responses to coach competing fashions. The claims drew pushback from critics who questioned how the follow differs from strategies used throughout the AI business.

In April, Elon Musk testified that xAI had “partly” used OpenAI fashions whereas coaching Grok, calling distillation a broader business follow. In June, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urged Congress to strengthen protections in opposition to international AI extraction after alleging Alibaba-linked operators generated 28.8 million Claude exchanges utilizing almost 25,000 fraudulent accounts.

Anthropic didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark by Decrypt.