Anthropic installed a spyware bridge on my machine? | Hacker News Reader

Anthropic installed a spyware bridge on my machine?

thatprivacyguy.com

151 pointstwapi35 comments

I don't know why this is flagged, just ran a query on my Mac and indeed, the anthropic extension was deployed for all sorts of (installed and imaginary) chromium browsers.

I've never seen or approved a prompt from Claude if I want any of this to be installed and I've never seen or approved a prompt from macOS that Claude is asking permission to mess around with other apps (though `Application Support` is probably not protected for non-sandboxed apps).

I don't think we should normalise or try to diminish the importance of good security practices. Apps that randomly rewrite how other apps your computer work are generally in the category of malware (and here we're not even considering Claude's apparently ability to execute local instructions based on random text it finds online).

agree this seems credible concern, and should not be flagged. @dang

it's probably flagged because it rubs some people in the wrong direction.

I would have thought this would be more of a story, I'm surprised there are so few comments.

"Claude Desktop, an Anthropic application, reached across the trust boundary between two independent vendors, and wrote configuration into Brave's application directory. The principle that an application does not silently modify another application is so obvious it rarely gets stated. Anthropic broke it in silence."

This is the key point for me - ask me, let me remove when done. That would be all it takes to not abuse trust.

It's being suppressed by the mods. I'd bet my house on it.

Oh thanks that Xteink X4 looks interesting, I'll do some research. Cheers!

Of course I realise way too late I responded to the wrong thread....

Command to delete the files mentioned in the article:

  find ~/Library/Application\ Support -name "com.anthropic.claude_browser_extension\*" -delete

I double Anthropic did this, as apparently people copy this manually and it's still not working :

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/14616

Of course if they actually did it, without your consent, that's really really bad.

He proves it in the article and mentions multiple times they are created in launch of Claude for desktop. Why even comment if you didn’t read

you are correct.

Exactly, what the hell. Apart from Google Chrome (and Firefox, which isn't in the list below) I don't even have any of these other browsers installed!

  $ fd claude_browser_extension.json ~/Library
  /Users/miguno/Library/Application Support/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser/NativeMessagingHosts/com.anthropic.claude_browser_extension.json
  /Users/miguno/Library/Application Support/Vivaldi/NativeMessagingHosts/com.anthropic.claude_browser_extension.json
  /Users/miguno/Library/Application Support/Arc/User Data/NativeMessagingHosts/com.anthropic.claude_browser_extension.json
  /Users/miguno/Library/Application Support/Microsoft Edge/NativeMessagingHosts/com.anthropic.claude_browser_extension.json
  /Users/miguno/Library/Application Support/com.operasoftware.Opera/NativeMessagingHosts/com.anthropic.claude_browser_extension.json
  /Users/miguno/Library/Application Support/Chromium/NativeMessagingHosts/com.anthropic.claude_browser_extension.json
  /Users/miguno/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/NativeMessagingHosts/com.anthropic.claude_browser_extension.json

I also checked Claude Desktop > Settings > Extensions. Not a single word or mention of these aforementioned extensions for browsers. I have zero Claude Desktop extensions installed and, without reading the article, would have never guessed that these extensions for browsers were installed.

Claude Desktop repeatedly installed/updated these 7 extensions since the beginning of February on my Apple machine. Every entry in the filtered log below is for all 7 extensions:

    $ grep "Installed native host manifest" ~/Library/Logs/Claude/main.log | sed -e 's/ at \/Users\/.*//' | awk '{ print $1" "$2 }' | sort -n | uniq
    2026-02-04 18:53:21
    2026-02-04 23:33:26
    2026-02-04 23:34:20
    2026-02-04 23:34:27
    2026-03-16 09:29:18
    2026-03-17 11:52:22
    2026-03-18 22:22:22
    2026-03-19 14:49:34
    2026-03-20 09:42:03
    2026-03-20 10:10:39
    2026-04-02 22:50:26
    2026-04-02 22:57:56
    2026-04-10 19:38:38
    2026-04-10 19:40:51
    2026-04-12 18:52:36
    2026-04-12 19:10:04
    2026-04-12 20:07:21
    2026-04-15 12:19:46
    2026-04-15 12:20:16
    2026-04-15 12:29:45
    2026-04-16 22:15:47
    2026-04-16 22:24:19
    2026-04-18 10:58:13
    2026-04-18 15:06:54

The later parts of this article listing out the dark patterns and security issues and privacy issues is great. Spyware may not be the right term but there is a lot that is wrong here and Anthropic absolutely should be called out for it. Many people and businesses are trusting what appears to be a mix of vibe coded slop and aggressive anti user growth hacks. So much for Anthropic’s high and mighty moralizing.

That’s not spyware, that’s just how native messaging is designed to work. You have to put a manifest there if you want the native messaging to work later.

Yeah, this. 1password does the same thing for any browser it detects when installed for the native desktop integration from the chrome extension.

Not 100% across the spec but this wouldn't functionally do anything until you install the related extension? e.g., it's pinned to nominated `allowed_origins`

Yea I guess the issue here is whether you think installing the extenstion should set up the integration or installing the thing being integrated should set up it. Im inclined to think its the extensions responsibility, but I dont think its a severe data issue.

With this argument you could also justify: "That's not a remote access trojan (RAT), that's just how client-server communication is designed to work."

> You have to put a manifest there if you want the native messaging to work later.

The point is that Claude Desktop didn't ask the user whether they want native messaging in the first place. Which is strange, given that users experience many "Do you grant permission to do XYZ" prompts when working with Anthropic products in other situations.

What you're describing was a norm back in like the 90's, but disappeared in the ought's/10's when companies decided the user actually being kept abreast of what their machine was being asked to do clashed with the ethos that "the luser is clueless, and we are not; just ship the functionality, and we'll beg for forgiveness later". I fought the attitude my entire tenure as a QA engineer, but business always seemed to get their override from the execs above.

At the point we're at, I'm so ethically locked out of unregulated contexts where one can't necessarily get away with that sort of thing, I'm beginning to give up hope the Industry can be turned around at all short of everyone with a modicum of ethics making the experience of computing so damned defensively locked down, it ceases to be a legacy worth passing down as anything but a cautionary tale on the hubris of man, and the ease with which men can be lured to corrupt ends via their stomachs.

No, it’s more like “installing software installs files on the system”.

That’s not new by any means. It’s no different than zoom installing a native audio plugin for the os, or other software creating files on the system.

You should not install Claude Desktop or Claude Code unless you trust Anthropic. You either trust them to be a responsible custodian of your compute environment or you don't.

I mean it almost doesn't matter what is installed at any given time, the agent is going to install stuff you can't realistically observe, the software will auto-update, there is simply no way you can be sure spyware won't end up on your computer.

Having faith on a for-profit organization about doing the right thing, with access to your computer and the things you do on it, may be a bit too much.

It was always quite a simple thing to do: “disclosure”. Explain me, in plain English, the things you are going to do when I install your software: do not bury it on a 40-page EULA with multiple amendments referring to different aspects that affect me and for which I would probably need a lawyer, or their very service to understand it, and that is of course subject to be changed at any time they feel.

It’s 2026 and they keep on nagging it: even Apple stopped doing the little summary at the beginning of the “Accept the New Terms” where they explained, in plain English, what those changes were.

And every time they do that, it is always on their favor: you code and eat pizza, they have a 1000 dollar an hour group of lawyers, ironing the hell out of their legal terms to must accept to use their services.

I am not telling you what to do, I am saying that Claude Code and Claude Desktop are not "normal" pieces of software that you can install once and choose to upgrade or not. It's a semi-alive agentic daemon. This is not something you can firewall and upgrade once a quarter after reviewing the changelog.

> You either trust them to be a responsible custodian of your compute environment or you don't.

"All or nothing" thinking...: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_%28psychology%29?use...

Well someone might have had perfectly good reasons to trust them before. But after this they might have perfectly good reasons to not trust them.

This is inacceptable.

I might call it a few different things, but spyware seems disingenuous until we learn that it’s actually spying…

But that won't fit the narrative that Antrhopic is an evil company nickel and diming their users...

As if we needed more evidence to corroborate that.

I'll stand up and say we do need more evidence of that please.

Have you seen the near daily complaints about how Claude is getting worse or more expensive? I feel like there have been many recent posts like that, but it’s not limited to just here either. It seems like a lot of people are feeling like Anthropic is at least being not transparent, although many would say deceitful.

Yes, very possibly bloatware fits it more, a shit pattern, and very dubious behavior but not necessarily spyware.

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