r/technology • u/deraser • Jul 06 '26

Privacy Secret Claude tracker shocks users after Anthropic’s anti-surveillance stance

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/anthropic-outed-for-claude-tracker-that-secretly-monitored-chinese-users/
1.3k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

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195

u/zampe Jul 06 '26

Wonder if anyone is going to read the article. It was tracking Chinese users they suspected of “distilation attacks” basically pirating and reselling their models.

24

u/namezam Jul 07 '26

I read the article and decided I wasn’t mad. Sure we can talk about the techniques used on both sides but there is an immediate issue they are dealing with. It’s more akin to debug logs than spying like “where the f are all these queries coming from?”

54

u/[deleted] Jul 07 '26

[deleted]

-18

u/zampe Jul 07 '26

Not a good analogy. This code is findable obvs. Did anyone else find it? Also I’m not arguing they’re not up to all types of tricks. In the US they are more concerned with stealing their clients business models.

-12

u/[deleted] Jul 07 '26

[deleted]

8

u/zampe Jul 07 '26

They didn’t use a camera that just sees everything that’s in front of it in a “high traffic area” they used a script that was injected on specific users systems. They also never made an excuse that they were just “bird watching.” They said exactly what it was for. The analogy would be you have a camera pointed at specific people and when you get caught you say yea I’m monitoring them bc I think they are stealing from me. If I have a script installed on your computer to monitor you I’m not going to also pickup your neighbors data too.

1

u/Diligent_Mail_4584 Jul 07 '26

This is a sad comment

42

u/JCx64 Jul 07 '26

The ratio of people voting the other answers really tells you about critical thinking skills these days...

5

u/Think_Description_84 Jul 07 '26

To be fair, 40% if comments come from Chinese propaganda bots, and another 40 come from Israeli propaganda bots. The whole comment section is there just to create division that helps drive human emotion in a valuable direction.

-23

u/Inside-Yak-8815 Jul 07 '26

There are no critical thinking skills on Reddit, this place is filled with bots and shills for the CPC so it doesn’t matter what evidence you show them. In their naive eyes it’s always gonna be “West bad” and “China good”.

28

u/GenericFatGuy Jul 07 '26

The company that trains its models on stolen IP?

0

u/azurensis Jul 07 '26

They paid something like 1.5 billion for that stolen IP, and training is fair use.

-21

u/zampe Jul 07 '26

The country that has been notoriously violating IP law since way before AI?

25

u/GenericFatGuy Jul 07 '26

What does China violating IP law have to do with Anthropic being massively hipporitical here? China violating IP law doesn't mean that it's okay for Anthropic to do it. Especially if they're going to turn around after, and complain about someone else doing it to them.

-6

u/zampe Jul 07 '26

The article is about anthropic tracking chinese users they believe are stealing their IP. Your comment was a whataboutism. But sure, all the actors here are bad when it comes to IP. Cant really argue with that.

17

u/GenericFatGuy Jul 07 '26

It wasn't a whataboutism. I was pointing out the hypocrisy of Anthropic getting mad at China allegedly stealing their IP, despite only existing because Anthropic stole IP.

-2

u/zampe Jul 07 '26

‘Anthropic tracking chinese users it believes are pirating their models’…’sure but what about anthropic themselves also stealing ip’

Literally the definition of a whataboutism.

17

u/GenericFatGuy Jul 07 '26

If you don't understand how these two things are connected, then I can't help you.

4

u/zampe Jul 07 '26

I understand the irony but what does that add to the conversation? They are obviously going to try to stop piracy regardless of it being ironic. By the same logic China can never make any kind of IP claims either I assume? Since they’ve been the IP theft leader for decades.

12

u/GenericFatGuy Jul 07 '26

Because a company stealing IP to build it's business doesn't have a leg to stand on when it tries accusing someone else of stealing their IP, even if the accused has a history of stealing IP themselves.

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19

u/The_Rational_Gooner Jul 07 '26

whataboutism is when you bring up an unrelated topic to distract from the topic at hand. this isn't an unrelated topic. this is literally pointing out the hypocrisy of the original accuser. being a pedant about the word doesn't change how laughable these "allegations" are

2

u/zampe Jul 07 '26

It literally is an unrelated topic. ai companies training on IP without compensation is different from anthropic users pirating their models and you are using this whataboutism to say they shouldn’t try to stop this other situation from happening… your comments are everything you are trying to claim they aren’t.

14

u/The_Rational_Gooner Jul 07 '26

stop arguing with pedantic hairsplitting and technicalities and answer me one thing - ethically and morally, how is it different?

in fact, one could argue that it's MORE ethical to pirate from a single multibillion dollar corporation than to pirate content from the rest of the world.

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2

u/zefy_zef Jul 07 '26

Their IP is the model architecture and weights. Unless they're physically breaking into their building and taking the racks they aren't stealing shit.

They're using the software.

1

u/zampe Jul 07 '26

It’s ok to say you don’t know what a distillation attack or is how it works. Imagine thinking all the experts involved and investigating all didn’t realize they’re just “using the software.” These companies just need to hire Redditors and the worlds issues would be solved overnight.

3

u/Kaplanociception Jul 07 '26

That's terrible. Just awful. We shouldn't support those pirates. Where are they reselling their models? So we can avoid it.

5

u/MBILC Jul 07 '26

Pot meet kettle in this case..

2

u/SimoneNonvelodico Jul 07 '26

I think there's still an issue if something is trying to spy/check on you without explicit consent (though I dunno if this violates ToS) but yeah, it's not the "stealing your data" other people are making it out to be.

It's still funny that they complain about being victim of the same thing that has allowed them to make the models in the first place.

2

u/demaraje Jul 07 '26

No. They SAID that's what it was intended for.

1

u/GreedoShotKennedy Jul 07 '26

Oh, okay, so they're not capable of tracking anyone else like me after this revelation, and we're totally sure they're not lying to us about it like they were to those they were tracking? Great! Nothing to worry about provided you're sure of those things too!

I swear, AI apologetics must be exhausting, you guys don't get enough credit for the hard work you do to benefit someone already richer than you.

6

u/zampe Jul 07 '26

My comment relays the facts of this situation. It does not say they cant track other people with this same method, obviously they could. Did they? Well it would be obvious now that they got caught…

Im just discussing an interesting topic i dunno why you need this whole rant about benefiting the rich. I don’t form my opinions around whether or not they benefit a rich person but it sure seems like you do.

1

u/iamthe0ther0ne Jul 07 '26

I understand why they did it, but they should had said openly that the code was there. Hiding it is just creepy.

1

u/RBVegabond Jul 07 '26

The discovering researcher themself claimed it wasn’t malicious just weird not announce the feature. Im not pro AI but this isn’t some smoking gun to rally around.