Cybernews coverage of Claude Code steganography controversy (June 30, 2026). Reddit user LegitMichel777 exposed XOR-obfuscated code checking timezone and proxy URLs. Anthropic framed as anti-distillation measure citing Senate Banking Committee letter on Alibaba Qwen campaign (25,000 fraudulent accounts, 28.8M exchanges).
Debate: Anthropic privacy policy may cover collected data, weakening “covert” framing. Anthropic engineer confirmed rollback planned. Company has been public about preventing Chinese lab capability extraction from Claude.