[dijit]

> How many don't know your Timezone?

The timezone fetch was to alter program behaviour at runtime, not to send arbitrary timezones for tracking reasons.

It was one way of detecting if it was a chinese person using the program and then behaving differently.

Malware behaves this way. STUXNET for example was wired to do nothing except propagate unless the environment had the right conditions.

[usef-]

The article on HN only said that they seemed to be collecting this to detect resellers. How else did the behavior change?

Most services I know that are trying to block abuse do collect device info

[wongarsu]

There is this whole thing where Fable silently starts behaving worse if they suspect you are trying to use it for RL or are otherwise building a competing product. This is likely the primary vector how that works: they check if you are in china, if you proxy your requests, and if you are from a list of known labs or match a couple keywords

[usef-]

They walked back that policy on the first day after pushback. They were upfront in the model launch that they designed it that way, it wasn't secret.

[dijit]

regardless of anything else, whether what you said is true or not: blocking program execution based on the detected environment is a runtime behaviour change.

[usef-]

Agreed. And it also applies to the "I'm not a bot" checkbox on most websites. And hundreds of other things people use every day.

[stingraycharles]

Yeah I also believe it’s a big nothing burger. There are far worse things these AI labs have done, detecting when Chinese labs are using Claude Code is not it.

[overfeed]

How do you know simple detection was the most Anthropic did and nothing more actively nefarious? The self-reposrted motivation was animus against "distillation attacks", which suggests active server-side countermeasures that could range from the overt (IP or user account bans) to covert (downgrading model performance or poisoning the response)

[theshrike79]

”Malware” lol

Even hotel and flight websites work like that, they determine your ability to pay based on your location, wall clock time and device OS - and FSM knows whatever else.

Are they malware too, basically STUXNET?

[ronsor]

Yes