A Chinese industry regulator warned users on Wednesday of a \u201csecurity backdoor\u201d embedded in versions of Anthropic\u2019s Claude Code, but the US artificial intelligence company described the mechanism as an anti-abuse measure.<\/p>\n
Claude Code is an AI agent that can generate computer code, debug software and review code based on user prompts.<\/p>\n
Anthropic prohibits users and companies in China and other nations it deems adversarial from accessing it, but users can sometimes get around this through VPN or third-party proxy services.<\/p>\n
Allegations of a backdoor first emerged in specialist tech media last week, and on Wednesday China\u2019s National Vulnerability Database (NVDB) \u2014 a cybersecurity platform affiliated with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology \u2014 said it had recently detected \u201csecurity backdoor risks, posing a severe threat\u201d.<\/p>\n
Anthropic told AFP Wednesday that the mechanism checked a device\u2019s timezone and whether a request was routed through a domain tied to an unsupported region or a known problematic entity.<\/p>\n
It said it was a standard way to detect fraud and abuse.<\/p>\n
China\u2019s NVDB advised relevant institutions and users \u201cto conduct a comprehensive check immediately\u201d and \u201cpromptly uninstall or upgrade to the latest secure version from which the relevant backdoor code has been removed\u201d.<\/p>\n
It also urged organisations to strengthen network traffic monitoring to prevent the unauthorised leakage of sensitive data.<\/p>\n
Chinese tech giant Alibaba told employees last week that the use of Claude Code would be banned from July 10 due to security concerns, people familiar with the matter said.<\/p>\n
Anthropic has previously accused Alibaba of reverse-engineering its AI models to mimic their abilities in a process known as \u201cdistillation\u201d.<\/p>\n
Claude Code engineer Thariq Shihipar responded in an X post last week to reports alleging that the tool was tracking certain data from Chinese users.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is an experiment we launched in March that was meant to prevent account abuse from unauthorised resellers and protect against distillation,\u201d Shihipar wrote.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe team has landed stronger mitigations since then and we\u2019ve actually been meaning to take this down for a while\u2026 this should be fully rolled back in tomorrow\u2019s release.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Chinese industry regulator warned users on Wednesday of a \u201csecurity backdoor\u201d embedded in versions of Anthropic\u2019s Claude…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":99162,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[53,387,898,11891,34071],"class_list":["post-99161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anthropic","tag-anthropic","tag-china","tag-international","tag-macau","tag-mna"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99161\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/99162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}