Researcher claims Claude Desktop installs “spyware” on macOS
Don’t have an account? Sign up > Try our antivirus with a free, full-featured 14-day trial Protect your team’s devices and data – no IT skills needed Explore award-winning endpoint security for your business Security researcher Alexander Hanff wrote an article titled Anthropic secretly installs spyware when you install Claude Desktop. Claims like that are bound to create two sides, so we searched for an official rebuttal by Anthropic. But we couldn’t find one. It would surprise me very much if they’d be unaware of the claim, since there’s been some noise about it. Users on Mastodon, Reddit, and LinkedIn are confirming the researcher’s findings and discussing the subject, so it’s hard to imagine Anthropic missed it. While looking into another matter, the researcher discovered a Native Messaging host manifest on his Mac that he did not knowingly install. On Chrome and other Chromium-based
Source: https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2026/04/researcher-claims-claude-desktop-installs-spyware-on-macos
