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Comment by ipsento606

21 hours ago

The situation is confusing, so can I please confirm the following:

* "Cursor Editor" is a fork of VS Code

* The "Claude Code for VS Code" extension, v2.1.313, was compromised specifically on the Cursor Editor extension marketplace / distribution system

* The "Claude Code for VS Code" extension for regular VS Code on the official VS Code extension marketplace was not affected

Followup question: was a v2.1.313 also published on the official VS Code marketplace? If so, your statement is that that version was not compromised?

24 comments

ipsento606

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ddworken  21 hours ago

Dworken from Anthropic here, that is correct: This only impacted the extension as it was hosted on the Cursor marketplace. It did not impact the official VS Code extension marketplace or OpenVSX. Users of Claude Code on VS Code are not impacted by this issue.

  • bostik  17 hours ago

    This is not directed at you personally but Anthropic (and everyone around this debacle) in general: please put some real effort behind planned crisis communications. The reporting on this has been atrocious and the comms coming from Anthropic have not really helped.

    FWIW: the decision to publish an overriding version bump across all lanes was the correct one. It simplifies comms and helps to answer the first question every affected party has: "but what does this mean to ME?" - much easier to deal with the flood when you can start by sending back "are you running, or have you ever installed version Y?"

    Time for technically accurate nuance comes shortly after, and in this case it has been lacking. Yes, you are dealing with confusing mix of various extension marketplaces. Explaining that to a questioning audience who do not have the necessary background information is non-trivial. Kevin's blog is pretty well known, but in this case the real updates are only coming in via a separate Mastodon thread (itself polluted by uninformed commenters) so the real, tangible and understandable details have still been missing.

    Claude and its surrounding ecosystem are a huge, high-value supply chain compromise target. Cursor's extension being compromised is not your fault but it is still your problem.

    Disclosure: done enough security incident comms in high-stakes environments with extremely demanding clients, operating under various regulations.

    • dannyw  2 hours ago

      Anthropic needs to issue a cease and desist to Cursor for claiming official “by Anthropic” extensions they don’t make or control.

      They would have done this in a heartbeat to anyone that they’re not reliant on for compute.

    • troupo  13 hours ago

      > But Anthropic (and everyone around this debacle) in general: please put some real effort behind planned crisis communications. The reporting on this has been atrocious and the comms coming from Anthropic have not really helped.

      Anthropic is incapable of communicating. They rely on random employees in random threads on random social media to do some kind of PR and posts. Regardless of the issue. Or even non-issues but features.

    • nitrix  15 hours ago

      You're confused. It's not Anthropic's responsibility to monitor and fix everything that's said correctly or incorrectly about them. They're doing excellent given what they're capable to do in this situation.

      6 replies →

sarjann  16 hours ago

My guess is someone published an extension on vscode/cursor claiming to be Anthropic when it wasn't. Kind of like me publishing an app called Youtube on the app store, being accepted by Apple and having people download my malicious app called Youtube.

  • chrisweekly  16 hours ago

    There's been too much guessing already. Anthropic employees answered in this thread almost 4h before your response.