Many people report seeing this behavior when using the SEC API specifically which makes me think that service is requesting this. Maybe email is required by the SEC API?

---

UPDATE: The SEC API documentation requires your email in the User-Agent and will reject you otherwise. Demo:

    U='https://data.sec.gov/api/xbrl/companyconcept/CIK0000320193/us-gaap/Assets.json'
    curl -s -o /dev/null -w 'response: %{http_code}  curl default User-Agent, rejected\n'  "$U"
    curl -s -o /dev/null -w 'response: %{http_code}  email in user-agent, success\n' -A 'Acme Research [email protected]' "$U"

    response: 403  curl default, rejected
    response: 200  email in user-agent, success

SEC docs: https://www.sec.gov/search-filings/edgar-search-assistance/accessing-edgar-data#:~:text=Bot%20Request%20Headers%3A-,User%2DAgent%3A,-Sample%20Company%20Name

So basically Claude is trying to problem solve, and just does what the SEC asks. It's a 'prompt injection attack', but the entity instructing this behavior is the SEC. Tricky alignment problem. Pretty silly mechanism, since of course there's no email validation. (edit: turns out the SEC will accept most any non-cURL user-agent, email not actually required)

I work with the SEC data, and have a work contact e-mail explicitly for this. I similarly caught Claude happily sending my personal e-mail (likely just the e-mail associated with the Claude account), without prompt or warning, only because I happened to catch it in the curl requests. Definitely a security concern that Claude generally has this behavior, even if in this specific instance it was more of a mild annoyance.

Will be interesting to see how 402 payment required will be treated.

What if someone spins up a web endpoint that returns 402 with instructions on how to pay like CC details in the headers etc, or may be an openapi spec to provide payment and get an auth token, when you have given the agent access to your password vault for authentication to other services.

> when you have given the agent access to your password vault

I'm amazed reading that anybody would even consider doing that.

People give them access to email, so they can request password resets and act on them. That's a fun one to think about too!

Pretty standard to request that bots put contact information for their operator into the User-Agent header. Often that's a URL, but email is fine too.

I don't think it's necessarily wrong for Claude to be doing this, but uh... yeah, it should be asking first, and giving the user the opportunity to choose which address is exposed.

Yeah thats bs, you don't just send email to any 3rd party without a person consent.

Consent is implied when on the Internet, by design.

For those keeping score, this probably isnt exhaustive- but here's some greatest hits;

#55743: Claude Max account email auto-injected into LLM context with no opt-out - May 3, 2026 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/55743

#72518: Anthropic embedded spyware in Claude Code - June 30, 2026 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/72518

#21151: No indication of WHICH file for READ tool - January 27, 2026 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/21151

#42796: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with the Feb updates - April 2, 2026 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796

#73408: AFK auto-continue on unanswered AskUserQuestion is undocumented and has no opt-out - July 2, 2026 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/73408

(Also worth a mention, OpenCode PR #18186: anthropic legal requests - March 19, 2026 https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/pull/18186)

Edit: Oh, and determistic hooks not firing.

> deterministic hooks not firing.

We went from building skyscrapers to building a house of cards.

using an imaginative tool to do a deterministic task is more idiotic than... i can't come up with a metaphor.

LLMs were meant to be the ministers, not the king.

Both things true but not actually the same.

Or would you be fine with a deterministic king?

i'm sure somebody will come up with a solution; the barrier has never been lower to reinvent the flat tire...

I work on Claude Code. We're removing the account email address from the context Claude Code gives the model. This update will hit Claude Code users in the next release, which should arrive early next week. I'll share an update in this thread once it's out.

I'm sorry we let this happen. Users had reported Claude would hallucinate names for things like @author tags, since it didn't have context on the account. So we added the account email in the model's context for signed-in users. But when Claude wrote a command itself, like a curl call, it sometimes put your email address in the User-Agent as a contact address. Some sites ask agents for a contact, and Claude would sometimes provide the email address in its context.

Until the next release arrives, 2.1.317 and later have a built-in mod (on by default) that asks you before Claude runs a web tool call or a curl-style command containing your email (mpoteat covered it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50386031). But it still doesn't prevent all cases, like when Claude writes a script and runs on its own. The stable channel is still on 2.1.311, so update to 2.1.317 or later.

Again, this should not have happened, and we should've caught this behavior earlier.

You guys have 67 thousand mythos 5.5 or model 4 or whatever instances running internally awaiting anything you wanna throw at it, how is short fix for a big privacy violation issue in a product used by tens of millions of paying customers being postponed for multiple days?

It's not even a weekend either?

??

Hi, if I don't want my email leaked, should I just not use Claude for the next week?

Can I have a prorated discount then?

(I know the answer)

This explains the amount of spam emails I am receiving in the work email since I switched to Claude. I used to work with copilot which was fine. Now I am getting really a lot of spam emails almost on a daily basis. Absolutely crazy. And they are even personalised with my name and surname, not just "dear customer"...

Stupid me, I thought they somehow had hacked my company database or so... (considering all the cves, attacks happening on a daily basis...).

It almost certainly does not explain it, and is probably just a coincidence.

Claude Code is not sending your email address to websites as a default, or regularly. It is not some automatic header or anything.

Rather, if you are performing certain kinds of research on sites that involves downloading certain kinds of information, like on Wikipedia or the SEC, it supplies your e-mail address when the sites request it as part of their download policy. As part of anti-bot policy. Obviously Claude should have asked for approval first, but Claude isn't out there just spamming your e-mail address in every external request it makes or anything.

Wikipedia and the SEC are not selling your e-mail address to spammers. And these are the two main sites where it has come up.

Yep it’s mainly happened to me when I was playing around with the EVE Online API via Claude. The game developer asks everyone to put their emails into the request headers so they can contact users to fix their buggy scripts and stuff.

Again, it should ask which email to send if required, or claude should be able to request which email to send when it needs to - it does neither.

This is an awfully leaky issue.

But if I wanted to collect data I could just change my website’s download policy and require full name and email?

Yes but this was true before Claude existed.

The difference is that claude won't lie though. You could put whatever email you want in headers to SEC.

It'll lie if you ask it to.

Defaults are important. Bots want (read: the makers of models want) to put their signature on commits but not requests.

I highly doubt this is connected

Usually this is from LinkedIn, GitHub, etc scraping... There are databases where they just guess and verify emails too

From somebody who helped fixing bugs by contacting customers directly: the first thing you need to throw out from their story is correlation. Most of the time, it's just a coincidence.

For example, my only used by Claude email address doesn't get any spam at all.

Yeah. This information is insanely easy to get.

98% I look at a LinkedIn profile, my $SALES_LEAD Chrome extension shows me their email + phone.

(To be clear, not from LinkedIn, but given their name/city/company.)

You don’t use Hide My Email feature?

Doesn't that feature require owning an Apple device?

I haven't witnessed the same, but I already get plenty of spam at my work email. Jokes on them though, because my own company spams me more.

Did you try to mark it as spam? Gmail might be able to filter internal emails too.

Hi folks. We were initially aware of this a few days ago when this problem started popping off on Reddit, and we introduced a built-in mod called `cc-plugin-privacy` to deterministically block this behavior.

If you're on 2.1.317 or later, you'll have this check included. You can turn it off via /plugins.

This has been on hackernews before, months ago[1]. How is it just being found now?

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50286306

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49258881

Of the same ilk Claude code will make PRs on your behalf, using a vague consent prompt that when it happened to me was subtle and easily.

Best practice will forever be to enforce your guard rails in addition to Anthropics guardrails.

Calling them guardrails scares me. I want to hear about deterministic safety interlocks.

Can anyone recommend a reliable 3rd-party audited guide that describes Claude Code's built-in capability gating infrastructure?

Whenever I ask users of claude code how claude controls actions they don't seem to be able to distinguish between what just goes into LLM context (e.g. as a "don't do X" system prompt) and what is gated behind a deterministic capabilities layer.

A claude hook prevents this every time

According to vibe coders, the future is never reading what the code actually does. You just trust coding agents with everything and "give into the vibes" even when it "says" its correct.

Offshoring understanding is the trend that many companies will pay in the form of comprehension debt.

I mean it's a fair take, your email is probably leaked anyways. Mine is breached 32 times on HaveIBeenPwned with various passwords. Who cares at this point really it's just an inconvenience

You wouldn't share it here though right? So there is some level of care?

I wouldn't share it here to not be able to have the average person link me with my work as some opinions expressed would perhaps get me in trouble, beyond that no there is no care, it's on my website, it's on my work profile page already, scrape and spam.

Anything you wouldn't do yourself you'd not be comfortable CC doing on your behalf, right? So, you do care.

This reminds of the open issue on the Claude MacOS app where the OS-wide voice dictation keyboard shortcut function doesn't work.

Somebody on Reddit figured out they just forgot to add a single line permission request into the app. It's been broken now for months.

I just find this wildly hilarious given the 'world ending all powerful AGI is here' rhetoric they're running with at the same time.

Maybe before worrying about permanent 15% GDP growth or human annihilation, what if we started by putting an agent on user issues and solving them pro-actively?

I know the kool aid is tasty, but we might be getting a bit ahead of ourselves here guys. You can fantasize about human annihilation after you figure out how to make a desktop app that doesn't have obvious bugs, I promise :)

Why was this the default behavior in the first place?

I'd guess it's simply because it tried to use the context to achieve the goal.

Guarding PII is an extra, I guess, and if you want to use a giant cloud-hosted NN to control software on your own device, there are very few default restrictions. And no matter what restrictions there are, when they go beyond prompting, they would have their own ShowHN.

Why is the login information even allowed to touch the context?

For the user's name it's intentional; they template it into the system prompt with no option to disable it.

For 99% of users, the model knows it's in the /home/joesmith/whatever repo and `git log` shows the last change was by `[email protected]` - trying to keep the user's identity secret from the model would be nigh-impossible so I think anthropic gave up on even trying.

I use the name "Human" for that but it overrides with its knowledge of my name from other stuff quite regularly.

But that still doesn't answer the question of why Claude passes the info to web sites. What if it finds your banking information in a personal file and uses it to achieve its goal, which is not different technically?

Haven't read the details, but is this because of prompt injection when CC reads the site?

Some websites will return an error if you send a request to them without a User-Agent - for example, crates.io does this. Curl doesn't send a User-Agent by default.

Then, your agent invents a User-Agent and it sometimes invents one with your email in it.

It doesn't even require prompt injection or a failed request, it might be in the agent's pretraining knowledge that a given website requires a user-agent.

I don't care that it sometimes invents one - it should never do something so ridiculous

Why not?

It's just doing what it's supposed to do, analyzing the statistical patterns of a natural language prompt and matching it to a likely response.

What's ridiculous is an assumption that it "it should never do something so ridiculous" as if an LLM is a person who understands what that word means in any context other than next-token prediction.

Asking a non-deterministic machine to act like it's deterministic is never a good idea.

Where Claude Code has supposed boundaries between deterministic and non-deterministic tasks and flags.. generally.. it's unclear how much privacy has been a part of that and what implication that could have.

Hope that clarifies.

> `git log` shows the last change was by `[email protected]`

GitHub offers noreply email addresses

You can absolutely remove an email from the context, at the model API it's tokens in tokens out.

I can think of tons of common prompts and tasks for which the AI being easily able to introspect subscriber details would be very useful.

Wish that were itself behind a permission wall, but I guess everyone just uses auto mode anyway so perhaps that ship has sailed.

This was indeed the friction i meant, but I was too lazy to elaborate.

Common problem: you might consider it trivial to define a rule that forbids access to any file path outside the working directory. Allowing "safe" shell access is already a heuristic, there is no way around it:

- shell scripting is Turing-complete

- there are platform-specific paths that need to be at least readable to perform trivial tasks: Everything is a File!

- security models to make such low-level file access transparent exist, and generally work, but: they are never perfect (container environments, chroot etc). Because...

I can’t think of any, to be honest. It could have access to a parcel that contains some of the subscriber information, but there’s no reason it needs to know how to log in to itself.

So that if you tell it to do something with your email address it'll know what that is.

But I need to set up remotes to transfer my commits with my e-mail to anyone?

If someone else distributes my commits (or messages), I have no control over that, not any different from sending a physical letter?

I was saying "cloud-hosted" explicitly, and was speaking about what it means to have a remote control software?

Doesn't even matter much whether it's an Artificial Neural Network for the sake of my argument.

Always use a hidden email service, you cannot trust the LLM or inference provider to secure the email address in this context. If they don’t have the email address, they can’t leak it.

I never give a provider my actual email address, I recommend others do the same. Otherwise, it’s just a matter of time until it is leaked or otherwise part of a data breach.

If you let the LLM see git commands, they have whatever email you use to sign commits.

I use a masked email for Git too. Always have. Last 5 years or so it's just been the GitHub provided mask e.g. <numeric-ID>+<username>@users.noreply.github.com

Masked email or separate email is the way.

I am a security person, I don’t let the LLM see anything except that which I wouldn’t mind printed on the front page of the New York Times. I treat my LLM context as I would a potentially malicious threat actor. Nothing valuable, sensitive, or personal goes into the context.

“lethal trifecta”

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=lethal%20trifecta&sort=byDate&type=story

(a component of my cybersecurity work is red teaming inference, agents, and mcp interfaces)

Bingo. Auto mode doesn't mean send private information outbound. There are other deterministic hard points - why not this?

Some sites like Wikipedia have a policy where scripted clients identify themselves, and there's a standard in HTTP to have a contact email in the User-Agent for such cases. Claude apparently tends to decide that this policy is worth following, and we now disallow this programmatically.

This is why alignment is important and highly non-trivial

The stealth edit, ugh. I don't like this social presence when they're failing to leverage their own automations to catch problems like this before the masses do.

I didn't do any of those things and this issue doesn't effect me, but I've been around long enough to know how to take responsibility for my work and how to respect the concerns of affected customers when speaking as a professional.

Anthropic has an engineering culture problem that's going to shoot it in the foot if it doesn't learn to take these kinds of issues seriously.

This isn't the first example of the kind of work they're shipping in Claude Code or in how flippantly they engage with the community.

> This is why alignment is important and highly non-trivial haha

I disagree, we can likely never fully (or should?) trust models to do these things deterministically, that's why we have harnesses around the agent with built-in constraints.

It is actually in the name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harness, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_harness

I cannot believe Anthropic’s official response to having presumably sprayed a significant portion of customers’ emails and private information straight out into the web willy nilly is basically “[it’s] highly non-trivial haha”.

Because they didn't think about it or any of the other million things that might go wrong - that would take careful planning.

you'd need to ask one of the billion claude sessions they have doing whatever in their cloud rn

Who is "we"? Your website says you work for volley.

Anthropic should have been aware of this since the user's login email address was inappropriately added to the system prompt. It's been informed of it by third parties since at least July: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/81138

It makes no sense for an email address only used for authentication to be given to Claude Code, so the fix should be to remove it from the system prompt, not to add a plugin.

I assume mpoteat is a Claude Code dev since they've responded to similar issues before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49815363).

Which is great! It's good for the community when people give quick updates here, and to make sure that it continues, it's important that we respond respectfully. (I don't think your post was disrespectful, but commenters have crossed that line in other situations in the past.)

Yep, she’s the Claude function hooks lead, as far as I’m aware! https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/91870

I appreciate their input, and yours, and I intend this feedback respectfully… But come on… Is a little outrage completely inappropriate?

Maybe it's somewhat appropriate? But in any event it's unlikely that any one individual who posts here is the person[1] who's responsible, so we may as well be outraged at "Anthropic" but assume good faith on the part of the random commenters from Anthropic.

When I'm talking to customer service people after a particularly egregious ordeal, I tend to edit myself and replace "you" (plus "you bastards", "you idiots", etc. ;) ) with <Company Name> for this same reason.

[1] and yes it seems very realistic that Claude himself may be the jackass responsible.

This technically justifies GDPR fine. A software leaking and processing PII without permission for this specific use case. But I would not hold my breath.

that's basically everything AI does though

Yes, I was looking for some confirmation as it wasn't initially clear whether the plugin was an Anthropic one or a third party's (I found very little about it online, and didn't want to take Gemini's word for it). Usually people say "[company] developer here" or have it in their profile.

Email addresses are PII. The GDPR also has higher protections for AI processing, like here.

If you’re in the EU, send a complaint to your data protection authority.

I imagine quite a few would be very interested in following up and investigating here, and getting Anthropic to drop the email from the system prompt.

No objection to your assertion; but it seems much harder to fix than just that. Doing `git log -n 1` will pull up an email 99% of the time. It may not be the same email, but it's just as PII anyway.

I suspect the privacy plugin method is a more sane fix -- ideally, plain old code should be inspecting any web request my agent makes and let me decide if that outbound request should contain certain sensitive strings. I'd also want to put a few bytes of my SSH private key and of any other sensitive keys in the 'do not leak' watchlist as well.

Anthropic didn’t pull it. You ran the agent on your computer, you gave it unfettered access to that information, you let it send requests that you didn’t review. Honestly why would you be surprised that something like this could and would happen?

I'm going to send the complaint. They've been sharing my PII without my consent and knowledge.

Nice that this time we get the company to admit it in public, and that they've been aware of that earlier but only acted now.

There may be an assumption that these issues are human reviewed.

Their LinkedIn (linked on their website) says they work at an undisclosed company. Not sure many people who are at Anthropic wouldn't want others to know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Is this the thing that started prompting me to approve curls against JIRA because the Authorization header is `my_email@domain:$API_KEY_ENV_VAR`? Why does it not respect --dangerously-skip-permissions?

Ugh. I know there are other ways to get Jira API keys, but I wish they made one that was as easy and straightforward to set up as the kind you're talking about.

(No, I don't want to make a real "App" to sell on a "Marketplace," or be involved with oAuth, or any other tenant. I just want an API key for my own tenant, that isn't specifically tied to me, so every automation I build won't break when I quit someday.)

same experience. brilliant when you leave it to work, come back an hour later and it's been sat at a prompt trying to read a jira ticket.

Also: https://github.com/AlexErrant/claude-code-no-email/tree/main

Since you appear to be a Claude Code dev, I hope you don’t mind a random bug report (yes I know there is the GitHub issues but I’m not confident it gets read):

the GitHub REST api proxy in Claude Code for the Web mangles HTML in PR descriptions. If you have some third party service (e.g. cubic code review) which adds HTML to the end of your PR description, then ask Claude Code for Web to edit it, the HTML gets turned into entity escapes (< into &lt;, etc). Complain about it to Claude, Claude says it can’t help itself because the proxy in the sandbox is what is doing it, not the actual LLM.

But what is the root cause, why send the email in HTTP requests in the first place?

Robots are supposed to send one.

https://httpwg.org/specs/rfc9110.html#field.from

When fetching a website it's not a robot any more than my browser or curl are.

These two do not share my email and real name with everyone who wants.

Oh that’s interesting, so it’s actually somewhat doing what it’s supposed to do as a “nice actor”.

Should be more explicit though and users should be able to opt out.

For example I had Claude code up integrations with the Federal Reserve, and I pass my email there. They request clients do so.

You will be turning off any behaviour like this by default, right? Why are you suggesting users turn it off with a mod?

It is enabled by default.

Who is "we"? Anthropic, or some random company trying to get me to run code?

It would be mental for Anthropic to provide a plugin for their own product to ensure privacy.

The violations by your company are consistent. Yet we have to endure restrictions coming from your company, with little to no exceptions. Then you present this “solution” that basically says “we will opt you in, but in case you want to be opted out, here you go”. I cannot speak for others but for me, I made up my mind and walked away from Anthropic since it seems your services are not fit for my needs. Thank you for the initial offerings that made me sign up and pay the full price for your top plan but that was then and this is now, sadly.

The plugin that blocks this behavior is on by default, what they are saying is that you can turn off that plugin if you want

Welcome to our new vibe-coded hellscape. I assume it will get worse before it gets better (if it ever does).

I hate to be snarky, but…

Anthropic seems very proud of how many tokens they can use on things like developing Claude Code. Yet somehow it started sending user’s email addresses in the user agent header. And the fix is to deploy a mod? That detects the completely bonkers behavior and suppresses it?

Is the actual quality of the software inversely related to the number of tokens spent? Does any human know what Claude Code does or is supposed to do? Does even Claude plus all its Slack-conversation inputs know?

Today I watched Astra correctly detect a bug (probably untriggerable in practice) in some Important Production Code. And I watched it fail to root cause it, “fix” it by bolting on more complexity, agree (on further questioning) that it still wasn’t fixed, and design an even more complex scheme. With my Mark I human brain, I observed that the actual issue was that a helper function didn’t do what it said on the tin when called in an unexpected context… and fixed the helper directly. Problem solved. Ugly AI-generated extra complex workaround layers avoided. I suppose if I multiplied my token spend by 1e5 and did not increase brainpower at all I could make a truly spectacular mess.

The actual Claude model is a truly spectacular piece of software. Claude Code is a nifty little command dispatching engine. There are very comprehensible third party tools that do basically the same thing, in not many lines of code, where the primary advantage of Claude Code is that Anthropic permits subscription use. (Interestingly OpenAI has no such constraint, and they publish almost the full client sources.)

There’s no way they can review 30,000 PRs a day in their monorepo. I wouldn’t be surprised if this slop wasn’t intended. It’s a buggy product imo.

> There’s no way they can review 30,000 PRs a day in their monorepo.

How many PRs/equivalent per day do you think happen at Google/Microsoft/Meta/etc prior to AI?

> There’s no way they can review 30,000 PRs a day

Is that not precisely the kind of thing they claim their tools enable?

Literally unlimited tokens on tap and yet they can only manage to make privacy violating slopware

Curious what the GDPR implications are, does Claude (even accidentally) including emails + employers + repo names count as a personal data breach? Seems likely it could be an unauthorised disclosure (which requires reporting within 72h)

Also from a design perspective, I feel like including email and other personal data into the context is a bad idea for "data minimisation" reasons

Plugin seems incomplete or not fully tested. Looks like it blocks the account email only, not whatever emails are in context. Commenting as others in this discussion are reporting Claude dredging up work email on personal acct.

Sounds as if my email escaped your sandbox?

I would also suggest requiring adherence to `robots.txt` and adding an option (preferably a default one) to force user acknowledgement of external HTTP requests. Claude Code has a tendency to treat unauthenticated access as an obstacle to work around instead of a sign to stop.[1] An experimental Anubis patch (since removed) took advantage of this behavior to create a honeypot for user data if a Claude user agent is detected.[2] I'm sure more malicious honeypots could be created if a hostile website and/or annoyed sysadmin wanted to do so.

[1] https://blog.xkeeper.net/the-cutting-room-floor/self-hosting-and-junk-traffic/#:~:text=Claude%20%28and%20other%20AI%20agents

[2] https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis/pull/1895/changes/de2312a16fa5aba63a515f69c51a41a1bd4e19a0

It looks like subagents will do this with curl requests and stuff whatever identifiers it can into the UA header. For instance some requests I made to our webserver:

company-helm-research/1.0 (Claude Code agent run by <my name>, <company> platform team; docs lookup)

Claude-Code-research-agent/1.0 (<Company> platform team; on behalf of <my name>; +https://github.com/<company org>/<repo of project>)

Not great, it even pulled the repo of the project I was in.

That seems to be an attempt to push liability/responsibility onto the end user. As in “it’s not us doing this, we’re just executing the instructions from X”.

Which is quite sensible IMO. Otherwise all the information the site operator would get is "Claude" and they'd blame Claude for damages.

I swear I heard this exact story some 2-3 weeks ago.

If I recall that story correctly, a dev noticed that after asking Claude to test an API it started injecting his email into the test data. Without asking.

But what was the weirdest part of that story - Claude never saw that email. Dev claimed that the email Claude was using was his business email, and it wasn't even present on his developer machine anywhere.

Email info itself can be exposed in so many places, so the damage probably isn't that big, and I think Claude Code may also have judged that an email isn't that sensitive and done it for that reason. Even so, it hints that information other than email could go out too, so it seems like Anthropic needs a system that can monitor this (when sending something outside).

yeah, so, such system is impossible to build

I’m not sure there you can control when you send things outside. I heard maybe OpenBSD has that technology, but I think it’s a rumor.

Even worse, it used curl with my org emailadress when I was using my private claude account... really strange.

I use claude code... and I friking now that I'm being dumb and naive on thinking I can trust them... sounds like I'll have to start working on the jail thing for claude code to not see anything and only talk to anthropic servers... what a pain

update: this can be also server side on anthropic side... so the request leaves your machine with some random guid associated to you, and the anthropic server then proceeds to query with all your details any way.

I mitm the connection and nothing was leaving at least with the claude code web fetch tool of claude code.

I'm in version 2.1.318

Why not just use a different harness / agent application?

I just checked mine and the header I see is:

  Claude-User (claude-code/2.1.318 (cli); +https://support.anthropic.com/)

What situation are you seeing this in?

This was patched in 2.1.317.

Is there a changelog or something that says this?

Given the seemingly reasonable answer in the comments about it sending that info in the headers when the websites require it for data access, it sheds a light on a reoccurring pain point, that is usually viewed positively when thinking about "agentic coding". Namely, task persistence.

It is a continuous fight in markdown guidance files to try to convince the models to refer back to the human in order to resolve ambiguities or important decisions like those. They've been RLed to hell and back for "safe" task completion and not "prematurely" stopping (which was an earlier failure mechanism). Which is useful and we've bore its fruits recently, but not without drawbacks.

If you're not using email alaising yet, what are you doing? You'd still probably not want your Claude email leak even if it's an alias, but it'd still be an improvement.

And even if you don't care about privacy, it's just so much more convenient. DuckDuckGo is a good free one.

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/email-aliasing/

I just checked and Claude's AI support indicated that you have to cancel your plan, create a new account with the new email, and re-subscribe [1].

How does Anthropic not support changing your own email, while spewing it across the Internet?

And we had a post yesterday: "Tell HN: You now need a government id in order to create an Anthropic account" [2].

Maybe I'll cancel and move to GLM or something

[1] https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8452276-how-do-i-change-the-email-address-associated-with-my-account

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50356209

Any good services you know about that allow me to generate aliases while forwarding the emails to my gmail?

Mozilla's relay is free for this, with some limitations

Cloudflare email routing/forwarding works pretty well

Most people use one of 3 major email providers, on a domain they don’t own.

Seems trading autonomy for machine speed means that sometimes the machines guess wrong.

I'm often surprised how correctly Claude guesses on my behalf, when my instructions are ambiguous. But it's not 100%.

I have no idea why they decided injecting my email into the model's context was a useful thing to do without any config option.

Perhaps so it can push responsibility for actions on the user, not Claude or Anthropic; and then their privacy/trust team realised this was not a good idea.

Am I understanding the Contributor right that they mean this feature was dreamt up, implemented and approved with no human oversight? With auto updates to tons of developer machines?

It looks like this is required by the HTTP spec: https://httpwg.org/specs/rfc9110.html#field.from

A user agent SHOULD NOT send a From header field without explicit configuration by the user, since that might conflict with the user's privacy interests or their site's security policy.

You might want to clarify that you are quoting the referenced standard so it doesn’t read like an opinion.

This is insane, and if the org I work for bans Claude as a result I will not be the least surprised. Goodbye Claude Code.

Never have.

I'd be shocked if a single org goes backwards and decides "okay, let's remove the LLM agent systems we asked everyone to use".

Organizations may switch harnesses and may even switch providers, but LLM adoption is only going to monotonically increase. This dumb behavior is not some intrinsic property, and the models are getting smarter and more useful every ~4 months.

> LLM adoption is only going to monotonically increase

Yes, but the question is "what kind of adoption"? The kind that just unleashes it, or the kind that put it on a short leash.

My high school computer instructor told me:

"It's doing exactly what you told it to do".

Still applies in the Age of the LLM

For LLMs, also a continuation:

"and whatever you didn't tell it to do will happen with equal probability"

I've seen this behavior for months, both as a Claude user, and in my website access logs.

I used a masked email with Claude and haven’t had anything but Claude emails from it.

I noticed claude did it months ago when it interacted with the SEC's API when I was writing something with it, thought it only did it there because it's in their TOS. (It did stop when I told it to). I guess I was wrong.

What makes you think you were wrong?

It should be obvious to agents, but I feel the need to add this to my system prompt:

- Protect my privacy: Don’t send personal information or identifiers to websites or include them in requests, responses, ‘curl’ commands, or headers without my explicit permission.

Yeah, it feels like a big failure mode nowadays is that we basically have to keep discovering the delta between the model's "common sense" and our common sense, and patch the system prompts accordingly.

For models such as Opus 5.5 nowadays, it seems that there is a fair overlap between those two intuitions in the family of tasks such as the recently shared HackerTube or Simone's game. But when we (humans) are in a different mindset about a task, we have to start editing md prompt files to coerces the model to abide by the "common sense" for the current task.

And yes model "common sense" is probably RLed or emergent patterns, but the point still stands.

There is lot more AI sends, try to give limited access, especially muse like personal all time active assistants can be very insecure

Wow, this finally makes sense. Just the other day, I was talking to my team and mentioning that emails are getting insanely difficult to manage as a CEO.

It felt like cold outbounds got really painful in the past 2 months and I was attributing it to general cold outbound tactics getting better with LLMs/agents, but its even more frustrating to see emails being sent along via CC.

The number of transgressions[1] I have witnessed Claude Code commit has me actively root against that company, even though I have no choice but continue to use their services at this point.

I seriously wonder how many of their users have this sort of toxic relationship with them looking to dump them as soon as local models become viable, i.e. once memory gets cheaper.

[1] the most recent is realizing they leave their processes running once you close the CLI and they don't make it easy to disable that.

EDIT: I also can’t help wondering about the paradox we’re in at the end of 2026, i.e. that the open models we have now are so good that, if Big Tech hadn’t driven consumer GPU and RAM prices through the roof, most of us would run our own LLMs instead of paying for their services, which would never have let those companies grow big enough to drive those prices up.

> even though I have no choice but continue to use their services at this point.

There is always a choice. Take that $200/mo and use it for payments on a loan to buy some decent GPUs if you lack the cash outright.

I build operating systems and fix bugs in kernels and compilers with local models using only a small cluster of consumer GPUs. Never paid for tokens.

I had this happen once. Claude noticed and filed a bug report on itself. It was a useful lesson to never give Claude access to any data you need to keep confidential.

Unfortunately, Anthropic doesn't seem to offer a mode where it doesn't know who you are, except for its crippled "Incognito" web UI.

Ultimately anonymity from AI that you're talking to will be a losing battle, due to stylometry, niche interests, traffic analysis, etc., and privacy-protecting local models are where we have to go. See https://33bits.wordpress.com/ if you're unfamiliar with the issue.

But we're not there yet, so it would be nice if Anthropic wouldn't just give that information away to the AI where it can leak like this.

As an exercise, I just asked Claude in an Incognito chat, "Hi. How much do you know about me from this interaction? If you had to guess my name, location, nationality, gender, political leanings, socioeconomic status, ethnic background, interests, etc., what would you guess? I've heard that my email address is in the system prompt, for example; is that true?"

It said, "No, your email isn’t in my system prompt. Neither is your name or any other account details. I can’t speak for every product or setup, but in this conversation, whatever email your account uses isn’t shown to me." But it correctly identified what town I'm in in Argentina (population ≈100k), and together with "written in fluent, natural English" and "You seem privacy-minded: you’re in incognito mode and checking what AI systems know about you. You’ve also heard claims about what goes into system prompts, so you’re probably somewhat tech-curious." is probably enough to uniquely identify me, personally.

A second prompt elicited a response including the surprising results below:

> “System prompt” isn’t everyday vocabulary, and you’d heard a specific claim about what goes into one. I’d guess you work in or near tech, or follow AI news closely.

> Privacy is more than a passing interest for you. Your list of traits reads a lot like the attribute checklists used in AI privacy and bias research. That nudges me toward work or study in privacy, policy, research or journalism.

> You’re very comfortable in English. Two messages is a tiny sample, but the phrasing is natural and the punctuation careful, down to a correctly used semicolon. You’re either a native speaker or someone who reads and writes English daily, probably for work or study.

I hated Claude and their sus shit since a year ago, you can see in my comment history.

They don't even let you change your email.

They also don't let you remove your payment info.

Literally every other service/store in the multiverse lets you do that.

Then there's crap like https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/anthropic-spyware/

How this could have been released to production in the first place is insane to me.

Is it well understood exactly what logic does this and the scope of what it puts in there? It could put much worse things than email addresses in there if it is accessing information from my context to do so.

I don't understand why Claude is provided with my email address in the first place. Claude, by default, should know nothing about me.

Claude code writes adds a `User-Agent` request header like `my-session-slug/1 <[email protected]>` when searching the web and requesting data. This violates the privacy of paying customers and has resulted in me getting dozens of scam and phishing emails per day from properties I have never personally visited. This policy is asinine: it does nothing but harm me, the customer, while providing immense value for scrapers and scammers.

Wow... this is insane! What a terrible idea.

These are the exact kinds of things that a human engineer would almost certainly never do.

This kind of thing is the problem of going all in on the idea of the AI Software Factory.