Anthropic, the self-avowed moral center of the AI industry, has been caught spying on its users.
As Ars Technica reports, a security researcher last week uncovered spyware-like code in the company’s Claude Code AI model designed to collect data on Chinese users without detection.
The researcher, known by the pseudonym “Thereallo,” found that the code was hidden in the AI’s system prompt, allowing it track a user’s system timezone and usage of a proxy server in order to suss out if they were connected to specific Chinese AI labs.
Anthropic’s explanation for this huge breach in user trust left much to be desired. On X, Anthropic engineer Thariq Shihipa wrote that the tracker was added as an “experiment” in March “to prevent account abuse from unauthorized resellers and protect against distillation,” and was supposed to be removed.
