this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2026
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I agree that this doesn’t rise to the level of “spyware,” but it is extra sneaky/slimy, and it absolutely, IMO, makes your system less secure for no good reason. They could just have a prompt in the UI the first time you attempt to use a feature that requires the native messaging host, which says something like “we need to install extra software to communicate with Chrome, OK?” This is the ethical thing to do.
It’s especially sketchy that they’re preemptively installing it in the right directories for multiple Chromium-based browsers, even ones that aren’t installed on your system.
Its not sketchy just lazy. One observation i have made eith anthropic is that they are great at amking a model but louzy at app development. There apps tend to have that "scientist learned python to help them at work" vibe. Which is always a security nightmare.
I disagree, it’s definitely sketchy. Going out of your way to install the messaging host for a half dozen different Chromium forks is going out of your way do something behind the user’s back; it’s the opposite of lazy.
I imagine it's more of a vibe-coded "make sure the end users have all the files they'll need to be ready to go" prompt, and it's Claude that "decided" to just have all the files from the get-go
Ah yes let’s wildly speculate about how they may or may not be writing software.
Is that not what we were doing? I'm not disagreeing that it's scummy that they're installing unnecessary files, just speculating that's it's ineptitude rather than malicious. Hanlon's Razor and all that. Considering the downvotes on my comment I may have misread your comment.
I think that's too generous. As if they didn't think about this.
i think a lot of their stuff is ai coded.
That’s not really relevant to the point I’m making.