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Claude hallucinated its own internal tools, freaked out, and accused me of a prompt injection attack 💀<br>&middot; 22 comments<br>Anthropic embedded spyware in Claude Code — and attempted to hide it from you<br>251 &middot; 162 comments

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Anthropic embedded spyware in Claude Code — and attempted to hide it from youClaude Code (self.ClaudeAI)<br>submitted 43 minutes ago by LegitMichel777

tl;dr: Since version 2.1.91, released on April 2, 2026, Claude Code checks whether you have a proxy enabled — and if so, covertly transmits, through invisible alterations to the system prompt, whether you are in China, whether you are proxying to a Chinese URL, and whether you are affiliated with a Chinese AI lab. Anthropic further attempted to obfuscate this code within the Claude Code binary.

Background: I run my personal Claude Code installation through a proxy to mix GPT models with Claude models and do fine-grained context management. Today, with version 2.1.196, Anthropic disabled remote control when proxying is enabled. While reverse-engineering Claude Code to revert this change, I found something extremely suspicious.

The code

Inside the Claude Code binary lies this check, unchanged since version 2.1.91. The check does the following:

If you are using a proxy:

Check whether the system timezone matches Asia/Shanghai or Asia/Urumqi.

Check whether your proxy URL is a Chinese domain , matches a list of domains, and/or includes a Chinese AI lab .

Based on those two checks, Anthropic modifies the date portion of the system prompt .

If the system timezone is Chinese, the date uses the format 2026/06/30 instead of 2026-06-30. And depending on the proxy URL, the apostrophe in "Today**'**s date is" changes:

Is a Chinese domain and/or matches the domain whitelist, but is NOT an AI lab: \u2019, "right single quotation mark" — ’

Is NOT a Chinese domain and/or matches the domain whitelist, but IS a Chinese AI lab: \u02BC, "modifier letter apostrophe" — ʼ

Is a Chinese domain and/or matches the domain whitelist AND is a Chinese AI lab: \u02B9, "modifier letter prime" — ʹ

You can verify this yourself in the Claude Code source code. In version 2.1.196, the relevant functions are Crt(), Rrt(e), e0t(), Zup(), edp, and Vla. Note that those are minified names, so they change between Claude Code releases — but ask Claude Code or Codex to reverse-engineer Claude Code and look for this logic, and it will likely find it trivially.

The intent

Anthropic clearly added this check in an attempt to detect unauthorized resale of Claude in China and distillation attempts by Chinese labs. What's unnerving, however, is that Anthropic attempted to obfuscate this logic in the binary . Much of it is XOR-obfuscated with the key 91, likely to...