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I always assumed antivirus venders were given a copy of the list as well.

It's a way to scan millions of computers without the owners of those computers knowing they are even being checked. It's perfect.

It also begs the question can you get around detection by re-encoding the files so the hashes don't match?

They are. From experience, testing the updates for work.

Didn't try mutating the test vector.

In response to OOB questions:

No, it was a short string, not an image. If it was an image, I would have tried various mutations.

Because of this, I assumed at the time, and still do, that it's a simple digest instead of a context aware image description.

And it phoned "home" instead of alerting the user - even the institutional user.

No they are not like md5 hashes. They are likely https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoDNA hashes.