You can say that this isn't compromise of Anthropic, but it sort of is in the setup. Cursor Claude extension is marked as something made by Anthropic, so default assumption is that only people who can release that new extension would be a team at Anthropic.
Since that is clearly not the case, that is just as much Anthropic's problem as it is Cursor's problem. There either needs to be a technical change so that extensions are signed with keys that Anthropic controls, or you should take the branding off from the Cursor extensions.
I was working on the clearly mistaken impression that "Made by Anthropic" in the cursor store meant that the artifact had been signed by Anthropic. If that is not the case, then two party's need to get their act together:
Until that happens - it's almost like you have to delete any extension from the Cursor Store off of your Cursor instance - kind of a crapshoot what you are actually downloading, no?For example - what guarantee do I have with something like: " This publisher has verified ownership of cursor.com" - when I'm looking at the WSL extension. Are there any guarantees it's not been replaced with some other extension?
The core problem is that VScode extensions does not need to be signed at all. Mind boggling stupid design decision.
Isn't the Cursor Marketplace separate from VSCode's? Maybe it's as simple as someone impersonating Anthropic because they never registered there? Code signing alone wouldn't help in cases like that.
Vendor A publishes a public key on their site for authenticating any signature. There is an entire subset of cryptography dedicated to addressing these needs. This is just yet another software player, Cursor, taking the absolutely easy no effort path because otherwise they would be, I don't know, "losers". I mean only losers would setup a basic authenticated provinance for bits of code they are pushing to the world to be executed by all and sundry. Really, this profession has become a complete clown show.
> Really, this profession has become a complete clown show.
Always has been because there is so far zero liability for anything someone programs and distributes commercially. That's the single root cause. If not that software wouldn't be in general such major shit show. What we have is the result of being allowed to throw out even the most toxic shit out without any consequences if it causes damage, no mater how large the damage is. Software companies caused so far over the decades likely hundreds of billions, or even a few trillion damages in sum, yet nobody responsible ever got the bill. It's wild west—since now over 60 years. This has to stop finally!
Let's see where things will move as soon as we have regular product liability for software:
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=legissum...
Just a few days left! Looking forward.
I'm having trouble understanding what effects that directive could have. Liability under what circumstances and to what degree?
That, and NIS2. Looks like a good trend, hopefully it's not just protectionism.
Well, if something than it's "anti-protectionism".
This is going to cause some major argument between the EU and the US, maybe even a trade war. Trouble is already underway:
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-lawmakers-urge-t...
Despite that I also think that this is the right and long overdue move on the EU side. We need to break the basic pattern that nobody cares as long as the responsible effectively never get the bill when they mess up.
Software is "Unsafe at Any Speed" [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed ] to bring a striking analogy — even we have since about 60 years the tech to build software which provably (in the mathematical sense) matches its specification. Still what you have on the market is utter garbage, and instead of getting better it gets currently actually worse with lowering the garbage quality level even more with "AI" slop. That EU legislation could become the escape hatch; that's why I'm looking forward.
I don't think even VSCode does this. Probably not even any package managers I know of? Code signing, yes, but not for organization verification? It's pretty much like a username - anyone can claim it if it is unclaimed?
edit: VSCode has a verified marker for publishers but I don't know how that works or if Cursor does the same.
This is a solved problem, just look at how EFF's certbot works. You cannot just claim that you are porn.com unless you put a payload there that matches what the bot expects.
And force everyone who wants to publish an extension to buy and manage a domain name? What if it expires? You're just replacing one set of problems with another.
You could make it a requirement only for people who want to attribute “made by”. If you publish a no name extension, you could skip it.
> Code signing, yes, but not for organization verification
They don’t do organization verification, but they do verify where code comes from. You may be sure that packages are built by alpine, which made sure that the dist files comes from the sources that the maintainers added, and the latter ensure that the sources are correct. In truth, it’s a very small circle of trust.
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i work for a large company that’s trying to curate vs code extensions, and this doesn’t make it easy.
we automatically block extensions and require that extensions must be approved, but this is a tedious process.
Is there finally a use for blockchain?
No, that is already solved by gpg.
Stop trying to make blockchain happen, it's not going to happen.
Using it for voting would probably be useful for the blockchain, but then the downside would be the potential loss of privacy.
You want an AI company to care about IP? And you aren't being sarcastic?
Cursor should not be shipping extensions that are branded Anthropic if Anthropic didn’t create that extension. If that’s really what happened then that needs to change, ASAP. Now that it has happened, IMHO, it is partly an Anthropic problem: the malware has their branding and their name on it, I don’t think they can just brush that off.
Does Cursor have some process that just scrapes Microsoft’s extension catalog and lists them in their own? If that’s hostile works then it’s broken and needs to be fixed.
I'm on my phone, "If that’s hostile works.." should be "If that’s how it works..."
I mean the initial translation kind of works too.
> Cursor should not be shipping extensions that are branded Anthropic if Anthropic didn’t create that extension.
Well, duh. From what I can tell, that’s literally the hack. A bad actor shipped an extension on the Cursor marketplace that wasn’t made by Anthropic.
No, you misunderstand (not surprising since 99% of the coverage on this story is wrong). What happened is: someone published an extension called "Anthropic.claude-code". That someone was not Anthropic and never was Anthropic. They just used the string "Anthropic" in the name of their extension. The comment you are responding to is saying that Cursor (the organization that manages the extension marketplace) should have prohibited someone from using a popular AI lab's name in the title of their mystery meat extension. They're probably right about that.
I think GP’s objection to the claim that Cursor allowing non-Anthropic to do it for 11 hours was partly “an Anthropic problem.”
It is an Anthropic problem. It's also a Cursor problem.
The issue could be resolved by introducing some sort of signing for openvsx extension packages. Then regardless of from where one downloaded Claude, it can be always verified to be authentic or not. This technology exists for ages and prominently featured in all mainstream Linux distributions. Cursor, Anthropic and other openvsx users need to work with Eclipse Foundation to make this happen.
Leading companies need to be proactive in reducing these surface areas. For example, if anyone can submit an agent skill, plugin, or MCP server with Anthropic or OpenAI's name into a marketplace, it is an attack vector.
Are you claiming that the Cursor extension store - marketplace.cursorapi.com - does not add their own proxy to Open VSX?
One thing at a time. Please just answer this one question. I am just some dude, and I would love to chat about this.
Anthropic is desperately dependent on SpaceXSI's compute (which either party can cancel without cause, on short notice), they can't really tell SpaceXSI to do anything without ruining their IPO; or more Claude outages leading to users flocking to OpenAI, etc.
That's nonsense. If what felixrieseberg said is true this is very clearly a compromise of Cursor and not Anthropic. Trying to spin it as a compromise of Anthropic is absurd.
I don't think they're trying to spin this as Anthropic being compromised, but I do think they're correct in saying this is Anthropic's problem to deal with now, regardless of the fact that they're not responsible for the root cause.
It’s like if 5,000 people bought iPhones at Costco and they all exploded, and Apple says “well we didn’t sell them.” Sure, but maybe not the perfect thing to communicate immediately.
No, it's like 5,000 people bought something that Costco called the iPhone but really was EvilPhone Max+ by EvilCorp. Costco should be on the hook for accepting the phones without properly checking they weren't bombs in disguise.
Apple would be 100% right to say "they're not our phone, we didn't make them, the branding was a lie."
Of course if Cursor actually has a direct connection with Anthropic, and Anthropic lost control of their keys... it's a different story and their employee is just obfuscating up there.
It's a lot more like a bunch of people bought Cisco networking equipment and then the NSA secretly intercepted shipments, implanted surveillance backdoors, then resealed the boxes and sent them on to unsuspecting overseas targets.
If there are no seals at all then it’s hard to argue this is the correct analogy.
And there was no interception. At the very strongest, the bad guys convinced Cisco to ship the stuff, and Cisco is saying it’s not their responsibility.
They definitely shipped something they didn’t build or check.
This is misleading; a better analogy would be if someone swapped out all iPhones in the store with fake ones.
In this situation, Cursor did not make any reasonable attempts to check this extension really was from anthropic.
So for the analogy, it really is like Costco didn't make any attempt to check they were buying actual iPhones.
A better analogy would be to say Anthropic must register their domain with every TLD available, to prevent someone cybersquatting it. I see Claude.org.nz is available.
It's literally not like that at all.
If Costco made iPhones under license from Apple outside of the Apple supply chain and they all exploded, while the Apple name is involved they have no direct liability or responsibility.
Legal responsibility, no. But apple's reputation would nevertheless be on the line. Is this situation I would expect Apple to pursue legal action against Costco for reputational damage, as I would Anthropic Cursor.
If you decided to use an umbrella to protect something during a hurricane and umbrella breaks and your thing is ruined. Whose fault is that?
Distributing signed artifacts is a solved problem (until NP=P is cracked at least).
That is not what was written; what was described was anthropic losing control over their cursor account - perhaps a key compromise, developer laptop compromise, or a fault in cursor, but of the three, the language suggests the first two.
This is wrong.
+1.
HN has a dedicated upvote functionality.
I think he's saying (erroneously) Anthropic owns Cursor. Reading this claude.com page [1] hawking Cursor you could be forgiven for forming that impression.
[1]: https://claude.com/marketplace/agents-products/cursor
That is simply not how software works.
From the producer's side, sure, we[1]'re all pretty sympathetic to the fact that if you publish a library a bunch of random people will build bridging libraries for languages that you have no control over.
But from the consumer's side it is very much an expectation and if you find yourself in the situation above it's on you to make it very clear that such extensions and third party tools are unofficial.
In this particular case I think it's fair to say that Anthropic really dropped the ball on signaling that this was an unofficial third party tool.
1. We specifically being library and tool producers that are noticeably overrepresented on this forum.
> Anthropic really dropped the ball on signaling that this was an unofficial third party tool
Had the tool been up longer than the 11 hours the malware was live? If not, then why would Anthropic try to get it marked as unofficial, as opposed to take it down?
Or are you saying that every author and publisher should request Cursor to mark their extensions on the Cursor vsx pass-through as unofficial?
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It might be wise to review comment posting guidelines - but, for clarity, no AI is involved in any of my responses.