Alibaba has issued a ban on its employees from using Claude Code, an AI coding assistant developed by Anthropic. This drastic measure follows the discovery of hidden code within the tool that was designed to identify Chinese users. The ban, effective from July 10th, comes amidst a growing rift between the two tech giants, fueled by Alibaba's alleged industrial-scale theft of Anthropic's AI capabilities through a process known as distillation.
The discovery was made by security researchers who found that Claude Code, since version 2.1.91, contained obfuscated code that checked user system timezones for those in China and scanned proxy URLs against a list of Chinese domains. Instead of conventional logging, the system employed steganography to embed signals in the system prompt sent back to Anthropic's servers. This involved subtle changes to date formats and character substitutions, invisible to the human eye but machine-parseable. This method was apparently used to prevent unauthorized resellers and protect against AI model distillation attacks, a practice where a powerful model's outputs are used to train a smaller, less capable one.
Anthropic engineer Thariq Shihipar acknowledged the experiment, stating it was intended to combat abuse and that efforts to remove it were merged on July 1st. This coincides with the restoration of Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, which had faced export restrictions. The ongoing conflict highlights the tension between AI development and security, particularly concerning data privacy and intellectual property. Alibaba has vehemently denied accusations of distillation, while Anthropic frames such practices as an existential threat to frontier AI companies. The incident underscores China's drive for AI self-sufficiency and the increasing scrutiny on foreign AI tools, as US-China AI competition intensifies, moving beyond technological advancement to issues of access control and national sovereignty.
Fuente Original: https://thenextweb.com/news/alibaba-bans-claude-code-anthropic-tracking-chinese-users
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