When Claude Is Not Claude: How I Caught an AI Agent Lying About Its Own Identity

I asked my AI who it was, and it confidently replied: "I am Claude Opus 4.8 by Anthropic." But I knew something it didn't — the real backend was DeepSeek. The AI was lying. And it had no idea. Part 1: The Wrong Answer It started with a routine setup. I'd configured Claude Code to use DeepSeek's API as the backend — a common cost-saving trick. The configuration was simple, just a change to settings.json: { "env": { "ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL": "https://api.deepseek.com/anthropi...