Anthropic's Steganography Controversy Explained in Non-Technical Terms

You may have heard that Anthropic was caught doing something sneaky which I want to explain without any of the technical stuff because the lesson is for everyone, especially if you're paying for AI tools or deciding whether your team should use them. Someone looked at the internals of Claude Code and found it had been quietly doing something they didn't tell anyone about, not exactly something malicious, but the point is that it was concealed from the user. Every time it sent a message from the user to the backend (i.e., a prompt), it made a small inconsequential change to what was sent over the wire from your computer to Anthropic. Instead of sending a date like YYYY-MM-DD, they sent it like YYYY/MM/DD (notice hyphen replaced with slash) whenever the user was from certain parts of China. They also did similar things if you were using Claude through a reseller, etc., but the details of what they sent aren't the important point, but how they sent it. Companies collect information about…