The uncomfortable part is not that Anthropic wants to detect resellers or distillation pipelines. That is normal adversarial business.
The uncomfortable part is that a “safety” company put a covert classification channel into the system prompt of a developer tool that now routinely gets filesystem, shell, git, and browser access.
If a random npm package changed invisible-ish punctuation based on your timezone and API host so its backend could classify you, we would call it malware-adjacent telemetry. I don't see how Anthropic is different in this case.
The uncomfortable part is that a “safety” company put a covert classification channel into the system prompt of a developer tool that now routinely gets filesystem, shell, git, and browser access.
If a random npm package changed invisible-ish punctuation based on your timezone and API host so its backend could classify you, we would call it malware-adjacent telemetry. I don't see how Anthropic is different in this case.