Anthropic got hacked | Eli the Computer Guy

Eli the Computer Guy joins Isaac Pound on The Tech Report to talk about a supply-chain attack. In late October a tampered version of the Claude Code extension went up on Cursor’s extension marketplace. For about half a day, anyone who installed it got an attacker’s key added to their machine and a reverse SSH tunnel set to survive a reboot. Cursor puts the number affected at up to about 5,000. Eli’s point is who those users were: developers, often with full access to their own machines, so whatever reached the machine had everything they had.

He goes after the labs hard. A company that warns its technology could threaten humanity should not, he says, have security this poor. He adds an earlier case where a subscriber’s tokens were drained through a hijacked session and the user could not find out who had used his account. Then he imagines thousands of agents inside a company’s infrastructure, all pulling the same poisoned update.

The second half is about walls. He compares agents to the API wars after 2010, when open APIs closed one by one once companies saw their value and the spam. Platforms are now blocking outside agents (Amazon turned away Meta’s), and he expects more, because agents scrape whole sites, can hammer a page to beat dynamic pricing, and trigger purchases nobody meant. His preference is AI as a heads-up that surfaces options for a person to act on, with proper machine-facing protocols (REST, MCP) instead of agents browsing like people.