Can somebody clarify for me - if ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL is set to a different provider... then isn't this "marked" system prompt being sent to that provider's API rather than Anthropic's?

I understand how this can be useful to Anthropic if the 3rd-party is acting as a proxy (because they end up hitting the Claude API with the marked prompt), but it looks like requests where "hostname contains deepseek" would never be sending data to Anthropic. What am I missing?

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pmxi 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This catches Claude resellers. Meaning companies who proxy Claude traffic for users in, say, China.

https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...

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pishpash an hour ago | parent | next [-]

"Catch" as in made a list?

	▲	eli 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Of the accounts involved, yeah. So they can lock them out.

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skeptic_ai 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Won’t catch many after has been on hn home page. And now the providers will be even more careful to upgrade the cc code. Might even provide their own agent to prevent this mockery. And isn’t what anthropic did unauthorized use of another pc which is kind of illegal?

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sandeepkd 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Thats the thing, hoping to control things on client side like this is a lost battle if you are dealing with technical clients. The best they can do is probably based on IP, but again the motivated clients would just create bastion servers in allowed IP ranges. I am surprised why are they even throwing resources in this kind of effort.

	▲	jgilias an hour ago \| parent [-]
		“Hey Claude, fix the issues with Chinese resellers and distillers. Make no mistake”

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eli 11 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Seems like a pretty straightforward approach to collecting session logs from a bunch of different people/devices would be to have them all set their base url to proxy.deepseek.whatever which logs the data and forwards to the real API.

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andrewmunsell 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My guess is for distillation, they need to forward the prompt to Anthropic to get the real Anthropic model's response so they can train their own models on it

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dannyw 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The theory is probably Deepseek might be collecting those streams, and sending a portion of it to Anthropic to see what the Anthropic/Opus response would be.

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2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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andai 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Did I understand correctly, that custom base URL triggers this behavior? So if I'm running Claude through a LLM proxy, I'm also affected?

	▲	2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		[deleted]
	▲	wett an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Ask Claude to check, lol

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nixosbestos an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I am also really confused and annoyingly stuck on this. I understand that the model name might appear in prompts for distillation (I guess? "You are RipOffModelv2, learn from these responses from Claude")?

I guess the only explanation is that there's a side-telemetry channel that still sends some data to Anthropic, regardless of ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL overrides.

	▲	sebastiennight an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> I understand that the model name might appear in prompts for distillation (I guess? "You are RipOffModelv2, learn from these responses from Claude") This does not make sense. You wouldn't send such a prompt to the Claude model. And when you're sending the prompt (anywhere) you don't have the response yet. This is not how distillation works.
	▲	MallocVoidstar an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		There are a lot of companies reselling Claude to Chinese users. You use their base URL but it's still going to Anthropic.