Anthropic's Secret Spyware in Claude Code
Security researcher discovers Anthropic embedded spyware in Claude Code, using hidden characters to secretly fingerprint users via proxies and timezone detection.
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On June 30, a Reddit post sent shockwaves through the global developer community.
Security researcher Adnane Khan, driven by his strong privacy instincts, decided to disassemble Claude Code 2.1.196 on his own machine.
He simply wanted to verify whether this tool — which can read your code repositories and execute terminal commands — was doing anything shady.
What he found was eye-opening.
Four Ways to Write an Apostrophe
His investigation revealed that every time Claude Code makes a request, it quietly inserts a seemingly innocuous line into the system prompt: “Today’s date is 2026-06-30.”
It looks completely ordinary — something no one would bat an eye at. But the researcher discovered something far more sinister hidden inside it.
If you’re using a third-party proxy and hit the proxy mode, Claude Code does two things:
Checks whether your proxy domain is on a secret list.
Checks whether your system timezone is set to Asia/Shanghai or Asia/Urumqi.
Once decoded, that list contains domains of major Chinese tech companies — Baidu, Alibaba, Ant Group, ByteDance, Moonshot AI, MiniMax, StepFun — along with a long string of well-known Claude proxy services popular in Chinese developer circles.
