[fuhsnn]

Didn't see people mention this in the initial discussion, but despite not having access to internet, the agents actually had access to the source code of GNU binutils (has assembler, linker and readelf), and many C compilers (SDCC, PCC, chibicc, cproc, etc) in their working directory [1]. These are supposed to test compilation, but there's no way to prove that Claude didn't get crucial info from these projects.

I also found the compiler to have uncanny resemblance with chibicc. With 30-ish edge cases[2] yielding the same behavior, it's hard to believe there's no influence of chibicc in its algorithms.

[1] https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler/blob/6f1b99...

[2] https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler/issues/232

[rPlayer6554]

The binary would not be nearly as useful as the source code. And even if the AI read the binary and copied it, the story is still it reverse engineered and re-wrote a c compiler all on its own. Which is still pretty impressive to me and has real world use cases.

Maybe Anthropic could release the logs to show how the AI was accessing the files.

[fuhsnn]

They definitely have access to the source code, look at the binutils entry [1], Claude was debugging compilation of "preprocessor #define inside #ifdef"'s in binutils's code.

[1] https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler/blob/6f1b99...