It’s outrageous that Anthropic is secretly engaging in espionage—far more intolerable than account bans. 1. The email contains tracking pixels. 2. Claude Code sends information from your local computer to determine if you’re a Chinese user. 3. It checks your operating system’s timezone. 4. It analyzes proxy servers and blacklists of major Chinese internet companies. If Anthropic confirms you’re in China through any of these four methods, it embeds this data into system prompts and uses steganography—similar to encrypted messages—to alter returned responses, potentially causing harm. But understand this: Anthropic performs these same actions on all users. Theoretically, it can arbitrarily ban, monitor, steal, or tamper with and relay information from every single user—this is utterly monstrous. Most people are familiar with the Prism scandal. Now, Anthropic is doing exactly that. With its most powerful models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, set to be released tomorrow, combined with this espionage incident, it’s hard not to wonder whether Anthropic has reached some undisclosed agreement with the U.S. government. The implications are chilling.