I was working on the clearly mistaken impression that "Made by Anthropic" in the cursor store meant that the artifact had been signed by Anthropic. If that is not the case, then two party's need to get their act together:

  - Cursor needs to add signing if they want to claim something was "made" by another party.

  - Anthropic needs to stamp out any provider from using said, "Made by Anthropic" until they start adding signing to their process.   Trademark law is useful here.

Until that happens - it's almost like you have to delete any extension from the Cursor Store off of your Cursor instance - kind of a crapshoot what you are actually downloading, no?

For example - what guarantee do I have with something like: " This publisher has verified ownership of cursor.com" - when I'm looking at the WSL extension. Are there any guarantees it's not been replaced with some other extension?

Cursor should not be shipping extensions that are branded Anthropic if Anthropic didn’t create that extension. If that’s really what happened then that needs to change, ASAP. Now that it has happened, IMHO, it is partly an Anthropic problem: the malware has their branding and their name on it, I don’t think they can just brush that off.

Does Cursor have some process that just scrapes Microsoft’s extension catalog and lists them in their own? If that’s hostile works then it’s broken and needs to be fixed.

The issue could be resolved by introducing some sort of signing for openvsx extension packages. Then regardless of from where one downloaded Claude, it can be always verified to be authentic or not. This technology exists for ages and prominently featured in all mainstream Linux distributions. Cursor, Anthropic and other openvsx users need to work with Eclipse Foundation to make this happen.

Anthropic is desperately dependent on SpaceXSI's compute (which either party can cancel without cause, on short notice), they can't really tell SpaceXSI to do anything without ruining their IPO; or more Claude outages leading to users flocking to OpenAI, etc.

Leading companies need to be proactive in reducing these surface areas. For example, if anyone can submit an agent skill, plugin, or MCP server with Anthropic or OpenAI's name into a marketplace, it is an attack vector.

Are you claiming that the Cursor extension store - marketplace.cursorapi.com - does not add their own proxy to Open VSX?

One thing at a time. Please just answer this one question. I am just some dude, and I would love to chat about this.

That's nonsense. If what felixrieseberg said is true this is very clearly a compromise of Cursor and not Anthropic. Trying to spin it as a compromise of Anthropic is absurd.

That is simply not how software works.