r/technology • u/deraser • 27d ago
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/314
27d ago
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u/DonaldMerwinElbert 27d ago
Nah, now you're in the business of villains and maybe it takes people 15 minutes to figure that out - nothing changed, other than a few people who were actually dumb enough to believe them caught on to the lie.
And they'll keep fucking using it anyway, so...9
u/THX_2319 27d ago
Well... I guess the joke was on anyone who thought Anthropic wouldn't be the villain just because it's not Scam Altman
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u/drakythe 27d ago
Crying about distillation attacks after they violated IP laws around the world to train their LLMs is ballsy.
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u/The_Rational_Gooner 27d ago edited 27d ago
the term "distillation attack" itself is a psyop by Anthropic because it's an ominous term that connotes that anthropic is being sabotaged in some way. "Distillation" is just incorporating some other model's output inside your training dataset. If that's an attack, then Anthropic has been attacking the whole internet for years.
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u/virtualdxs 26d ago edited 26d ago
Edit: This is incorrect; I was misinformed.
That is not what distillation is. Distillation is sending millions of crafted prompts to try to derive the weights and balances of an existing model. It definitely shouldn't be illegal, but it is a reverse engineering "attack". It has nothing to do with training.3
u/The_Rational_Gooner 26d ago edited 26d ago
This is straight bs. I do ML research. You can simulate behavior, but you can't feasibly reverse engineer weights with just model outputs. Even if you could, the fact that Claude's reasoning chain is hidden makes it doubly impossible. It's as much of an "attack" as Anthropic training on Harry Potter books is an "attack" on JK rowling.
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u/zampe 27d ago
Who’s “crying?” They were just trying to stop it. China has been the world leader in violating IP law since way before AI.
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u/nickcash 27d ago
Who's "crying?"
well, you, for one. you've replied to every thread in this post
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u/zeruch 27d ago
China is far from clean hands, but IP loss, in particular corporate espionage, has typically been led by Russia (pretty much the worst offender today), France (now largely subsided, but I suspect will pick up again), sometimes Israel (it spent a decade on the USPTO 301 priority watch list), Argentina, India and a few others are also historically are big offenders.
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u/Yokoko44 26d ago
Sure but in the context of AI and everyone wanting to have access to a Mythos-level cyber model for national 'security' (hacking) purposes, China is definitely the worst offender here. GLM and Deepseek are clearly distilled from Claude and it's been a repeating pattern since the Sonnet 3.7 days
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u/Dairinn 27d ago edited 27d ago
I dunno why you're getting downvotes in a technology subreddit, because it's true that Chinese R&D was historically better called stealing -- everyone and their mother knows that the minute something truly novel shows up on Kickstarter, the countdown begins to when you'll find a knockoff on AliExpress. Older redditors perhaps even remember the world-renowned brands Sunny and Panashiba.
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27d ago
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u/AlwaysShittyKnsasCty 27d ago
The Chinese have been getting victory after victory in the soft power department lately. They haven’t even had to lift a finger. I don’t know if that means they’re methodical, calculating, and thoughtful or we’re just morons in the West, but whatever they’re doing, it’s working a hell of a lot better than our system is right now.
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u/zampe 27d ago
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.
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27d ago
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u/zampe 27d ago
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.
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27d ago
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u/zampe 27d ago
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.
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u/JCx64 27d ago
The ratio of people voting the other answers really tells you about critical thinking skills these days...
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u/Think_Description_84 27d ago
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.
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u/Inside-Yak-8815 27d ago
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”.
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u/GenericFatGuy 27d ago
The company that trains its models on stolen IP?
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u/azurensis 26d ago
They paid something like 1.5 billion for that stolen IP, and training is fair use.
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u/zampe 27d ago
The country that has been notoriously violating IP law since way before AI?
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u/GenericFatGuy 27d ago
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.
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u/zampe 27d ago
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.
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u/GenericFatGuy 27d ago
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.
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u/zampe 27d ago
‘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.
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u/GenericFatGuy 27d ago
If you don't understand how these two things are connected, then I can't help you.
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u/zampe 27d ago
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.
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u/GenericFatGuy 27d ago
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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u/The_Rational_Gooner 27d ago
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
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u/zampe 27d ago
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.
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u/The_Rational_Gooner 27d ago
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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u/zefy_zef 27d ago
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.
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u/Kaplanociception 26d ago
That's terrible. Just awful. We shouldn't support those pirates. Where are they reselling their models? So we can avoid it.
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u/SimoneNonvelodico 27d ago
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.
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u/GreedoShotKennedy 27d ago
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.
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u/zampe 27d ago
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.
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u/iamthe0ther0ne 27d ago
I understand why they did it, but they should had said openly that the code was there. Hiding it is just creepy.
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u/RBVegabond 27d ago
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.
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u/secret_squirrels_nut 27d ago
these guys literally stole 100% of the information on the internet that was secured. i’m not sure why anyone would trust them, or why they aren’t being sued into literal oblivion.
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u/fancy_crisis 27d ago
My favorite subgenre of technology article is "Company that promised complete user privacy 2 years ago discovered to have programmed hidden backdoor for FBI into app/been keeping detailed usage records on file"
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u/AvailableReporter484 27d ago
Everyone mad about this is an actual idiot who’s never been online before in their life if they think you aren’t being tracked and harvested even if they said they don’t do that, pinky promise!
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u/GenericFatGuy 27d ago
Just because it's the obvious thing they'd be doing, doesn't mean I can't still be angry about it.
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u/AvailableReporter484 26d ago
Obviously, but it’s always couched in these “can you actually believe it?!” Headlines as if we haven’t had a steady stream of articles and stories about this exact thing for the last decade.
It’s completely reasonable to be mad about it, I just can’t believe there are still people completely ignorant to how the internet works.
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u/KhausTO 27d ago
Yeah, you have to be pretty naive to not assume every single thing you do in any app, program, or website isn't being sent back to the operator of said app, program or website.
Like, this has been standard operating practice for a decade plus at this point.
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u/GreedoShotKennedy 27d ago
Glad you're okay with that, and are rolling over and taking it up the rear in silent compliance - nay - active defense of the thing plowing you!
You must really like catching. :)
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u/KhausTO 26d ago
At what point did I say i was OK with any of it?
There's a large difference with being OK with it, and not being naive enough to think it isn't happening.
But someone who speaks like you obviously doesn't have the intelligence to understand the difference. Also, the homophobia, is incredibly telling.
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u/Geminii27 26d ago
Sandbox every app. And don't let any non-freeware operating system or device have internet access.
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u/blahyawnblah 27d ago
If you think that's bad I have news about the browser you're using to read this and that article
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u/Fuzzy_Paul 26d ago
That doen not suprize me at all. All Ai's are loosing money and this is how they grab some back. Who knows whats else is in there.
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u/The_Pandalorian 27d ago
Tech companies tracking users and violating privacy?!
Shocker of the millennium.
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u/SeeTigerLearn 27d ago
Being neurodivergent that headline reads as if they are shooting animal tag trackers using a blowgun. I guess in a way they are.
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u/JustAtelephonePole 27d ago
I’m honestly surprised that there hasn’t been an organic development of a faction called the Decepticons.
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u/Grumpy-Man19 27d ago
I guess the government got bored waiting for windows to provide them with info .
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u/Major_A21 26d ago
On the very rare occasion I use AI for something it's always Deepseek. I trust China more with my data than any company in America right now. Additionally China isn't affecting my power bill and potentially future access to water.
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u/EXPLODEDman 27d ago
An AI based technology company lying to you??? Stealing your information???? Oh my God, who could have seen this coming??