Claude Code Telemetry Rollback: Anthropic Responds to Backdoor Allegations

Researchers found obfuscated client-side logic in Anthropic's Claude Code that surveilled system time zones and API endpoints to flag Chinese users and certain third-party API usage; telemetry was appended to prompts and transmitted to Anthropic, which could enable targeted throttling, reduced model performance, or account bans. After community backlash an Anthropic engineer called the feature an experiment and announced its removal, stating stronger backend mitigations have been deployed.