#steganography

Anthropic's Claude Code terminal-based coding tool was discovered to embed steganographic markers in its outgoing API requests without prior disclosure. A developer reverse-engineered the tool and published the findings, sparking community debate. This raises serious transparency and trust concerns for developers who rely on Claude Code, as hidden markers could be used to track usage or identify specific users. It also highlights broader issues of ethics and disclosure in AI developer tools. The steganographic markers were inserted into Base64-encoded strings using dollar signs as hidden signals, likely intended to identify requests originating from Chinese companies engaging in model distillation. Anthropic has not officially commented on the findings.