Anthropic embedded spyware in Claude Code — and attempted to hide it from you

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