Top Google Result for Claude Code is Malicious

Why I don't trust google anymore

I just got my new MacBook today, and I went to install Claude code.

I did what anyone else would do and searched google for “install claude code”

I clicked the first as I usually do and came across what looked like the right thing. Unfortunately, I didn’t have ublock installed yet, and I clicked the first link..Some of you can see where this is going.

I copied the code and was about to press enter and then thought…wait a minute..that doesn’t seem right..

Thankfully, I ctl+c’d it just in time. I consider myself fairly adept at this kind of thing, but how many people won’t notice arcane scripts they’re told to copy / paste into the terminal? And these days, it’s almost normalized too. A lot of people are using these AI tools who’ve never used a CLI in the past.

As of today, Sun Mar 15, 12:17UTC, this ad is still active.

Virustotal: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/853c4b09cc8e4efb90f42f9bc81e1f7adb6fdc1a766e4abaf933b7aaee9657fa

I’m sure there will be tons of Google sympathizers who will say how this is a Hard Problem(TM), but this is obviously something google can stop anytime if they wanted to.

I wonder how many thousands of people unknowingly have had their computers compromised. Maybe this is pretty benign. I guess these days, mining your anthropic API keys is probably more valuable than mining bitcoins — hopefully that’s all it does, but I have no idea.

I’ve spent a lot of ad dollars in google in my life, and it’s obvious they’ve succumbed to the general capitalist greed spiral a long time ago. But this flushed any goodwill I had for them down the drain.

If this how google chooses to go out, then their death cannot come fast enough.