Anthropic plans to remove hidden codes it added to Claude Code several months ago to catch other AI companies trying to steal from its models. Thariq Shihipar, an engineer at Anthropic who works on the Claude Code team, said on Tuesday that a fix should appear on July 1. "This is an experiment we launched in March that was meant to prevent account abuse from unauthorized resellers and protect against distillation," Shihipar explained. "The team has landed stronger mitigations since then and we’ve actually been meaning to take this down for a while." He said the pull request to remove the code has been merged and should appear in Wednesday's Claude Code release. The experiment, as described by a developer who goes by the name Thereallo, consisted of applying steganography to the Claude Code system context. The relevant code checks Claude Code's base URL environment variable; if overridden, it checks the system timezone and whether the hostname matches any entry in a list of known Chinese AI labs, other AI companies, account resellers, and gateway domains. Asked whether Anthropic disclosed its covert usage tracking mechanism in any terms of service documents, a company spokesperson pointed to Shihipar's remarks, which did not address that question.