[fwip]

I'm trying not to be flippant (let me know if I failed), but most tools with an online connection send back a lot of information about you, with just about the same amount of disclosure (somewhere in the EULA it says they may).

Especially if you play any online games with ranked or PvP, they are likely doing a ton of work to prevent cheaters - and this information is necessarily going to be obfuscated, to delay the cheaters/hackers in their efforts to work around it.

From Anthropic's point of view, they have a class of "cheaters" they're trying to detect - people trying to distill their models. Those people are of course going to try to work around any detection, so you can't send that signal in clear-text where it is easily detected and blocked.

[doginasuit]

This isn't an online game we are talking about, it is a fundamentally different kind of application, non-deterministic and capable of manipulation. The bar is much higher. They should collect analytics if it is necessary to provide the service, but they should do so transparently. The solution to snare cheaters can't be worth the sacrifice of trust through non-transparent collection of user data. Although this particular information might not seem sensitive, if they are willing to use this method at all, they are probably willing to use it in other ways.