Epzillon

Did i say malware is being installed? And am i not allowed to hypothesize?

I see the security hole. I imagine some ways it could be abused by an attacker. I admit I am not knowledgable in extension development to make it clear those are hypothesized ideas. Hell theyre even phrased like question? I even agree this is not directly malware and that saying so is a stretch.

Your comment seems very dismissive in the way you phrase this as intended behaviour. A security flaw like this can impossibly be intended behaviour.

In my previous comment i also say thats calling it malware is a bit far-fetched but the security issues are absolutely there and should not be dismissed as “intended behaviour”. Especially not by a company like Anthropic.

I am not well versed in extension development but is there anything stopping me from making an open source extension and just defining the ID as one of the three in the article? It most likely couldnt be released via the chrome addon store but if it is installed outside of thar? And how are these IDs read after install, could it potentially be altered by something from the outside?

I immediately see so many flaws with this implementation it is worrying that a company the size of Anthropic does this.

Excuse me if im misunderstanding something but what exactly am i making up?

Even if this was an opt-in feature the implementation is still terrible and a massive security hole. If id wanted the desktop app entirely and solely for this purpose i still would not expect my browser extension to have full access to my computer. I understand the app does, not the browser extension.

No matter how you twist and turn this situation Anthtopic has still introduced a major security issue in their application. It might be a bit far to call it malware immediately but it sure does open up a massive attack vector to take advantage of.

The fact that the end user is not even informed or have a choice about this makes it all the more problematic and Anthropic not commenting on it makes me think its either intentional or at the very least already known.