So Anthropic employees are using Claude Code to contribute AI-generated code to open source repositories and hiding the fact using their own internal “undercover mode”.
Totally trustworthy people.
(Any open source project that at the very least requires disclosure of AI-authored contributions should immediately ban Anthropic employees on principle.)
@aral Honestly I don't actually hate this.
It's a tool. The _user_ is responsible for what they're submitting. It's putting code generated by them in their name. I think this is actually good.
@glyph Yeah, I disagree. Code isn't ingredients and it's not “contamination" any more than you should label “I used search and replace on this”
What you want to know is whether it was well engineered or not.
And in fact, this is almost entirely orthogonal to "safety”. This is an engineering product. The safety comes from processes and whether or not _anyone checked the work done was right_, not the inputs.
@aredridel @glyph What "AI coding tools" *should* be putting in commit messages is:
Co-Authored-By: An unknown and unknowable set of people who did not consent to their work being used this way and to which there is no license for inclusion.
@dalias Morally arguable but not actually true under the copyright regime that exists.
At what point does learning from others constitute their authorship?
@aredridel @dalias
> but not actually true under the copyright regime that exists
Under the copyright regime that exists in the US specifically, the generated code is at best not copyrightable at all (and therefore cannot be included into any projects with licenses relying on copyright).
Of course maintainers of said projects might decide to yolo it, but also they might decide to not; and in this case, the intentional deception by antropic becomes even more significant fraud.
@aredridel @dalias but in this specific case, the people submitting PRs are the one that created the tool.
We're talking specifically about a tool developed by Anthropic, which has a separate mode for Anthropic employees, which purposefully is "operating undercover" and creating MRs that mislead OSS maintainers about provenance of these MRs.
@IngaLovinde Are there any examples of misleading out there?
Or is it _just not mentioning it_?
@aredridel when a developer submits code, the default assumption is that they wrote it (and not, say, plagiarized it from somewhere without actually understanding it).
And on the original screenshot, it's clear that not only do they not mention the actual provenance themselves, but that they go extra mile to ensure that it doesn't leak in any other way.
"You are operating UNDERCOVER", "do not blow your cover", "NEVER include [...] any [...] attribution" communicates intent very clearly and is a very clear admission of guilt, regardless of whether these magic instructions to LLM actually work or not.
Aral Balkan
Mx. Aria Stewart
Glyph
Cassandrich
Inga stands with 🇺🇦 🇵🇸