Anthropic has withdrawn a covert monitoring feature designed to track whether users were located within China’s borders or had ties to Chinese artificial intelligence laboratories, following a wave of criticism on social media. Earlier this week, a Reddit post alleged that Claude Code, Anthropic’s software development tool, was secretly collecting and transmitting information indicating whether a user was located in China and whether they were affiliated with a Chinese AI laboratory. An analysis by cybersecurity newsletter International Cyber Digest reported that Claude Code embedded data such as users’ time zones, proxy usage and potential links to AI laboratories into system prompts using methods that Chinese users would not easily detect. Thariq Shihipar, a member of Anthropic’s technical team working on the Claude Code project, confirmed the practice, stating it was “an experiment launched in March to prevent account abuse by unauthorized resellers and to protect against model distillation.” He added that the team had already been planning to remove the functionality and that it would be phased out completely in the near future. Anthropic has previously accused Chinese AI companies DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax and Alibaba Group of illegally using responses generated by Claude models to train their own large language models.