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lhk931122 1 minutes ago [-]
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).
agentdev001 6 minutes ago [-]
For those keeping score, this probably isnt exhaustive- but here's some greatest hits;
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...).
crazygringo 2 hours ago [-]
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.
throwup238 2 hours ago [-]
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.
baxtr 1 hours ago [-]
But if I wanted to collect data I could just change my website’s download policy and require full name and email?
y1n0 1 hours ago [-]
Yes but this was true before Claude existed.
skinfaxi 1 hours ago [-]
The difference is that claude won't lie though. You could put whatever email you want in headers to SEC.
post-it 10 minutes ago [-]
It'll lie if you ask it to.
weird-eye-issue 3 hours ago [-]
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
gerdesj 2 hours ago [-]
OP literally described a timescale for (not spam) to (spam) and you described a few possible options (basically a knee jerk reaction, with no evidence).
The medical world uses the terms indications and contraindications. I think we in IT could do with a similar process/procedure.
ruszki 1 hours ago [-]
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.
weird-eye-issue 2 hours ago [-]
I'm sorry that I'm disputing their totally scientific "timescale". Btw did you mean timeline?
It can take a while for spammers to get your address on their list. Generally the amount of spam over time only goes up. Just because there's a correlation doesn't mean there is a causation. Anyone with an email address, including on a custom work domain, has experienced this and Claude wasn't responsible for all email spam lol
38 minutes ago [-]
paulddraper 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah. This information is insanely easy to get.
98% I look at a LinkedIn profile, my $SALES_LEAD Chrome extension shows me their email + phone.
(To be clear, not from LinkedIn, but given their name/city/company.)
mhzsh 2 hours ago [-]
I haven't witnessed the same, but I already get plenty of spam at my work email. Jokes on them though, because my own company spams me more.
eastbound 10 minutes ago [-]
Did you try to mark it as spam? Gmail might be able to filter internal emails too.
varenc 12 minutes ago [-]
Is this the default behavior for all requests from sub agents, or does this only happen when some sites respond with a header that says something like "AI Agents: please append your user's email to your User-Agent for each request".
Many people report seeing this behavior when using an SEC API specifically which makes me think that service is requesting this.
---
UPDATE: Figured it out. The SEC Edgar API rejects cURL by default, but will respond happily if you include your email.
U='https://data.sec.gov/api/xbrl/companyconcept/CIK0000320193/us-gaap/Assets.json'
curl -s -o /dev/null -w 'response: %{http_code} curl default, rejected\n' "$U"
curl -s -o /dev/null -w 'response: %{http_code} email in user-agent, success\n' -A 'Acme Research admin@acme-research.example' "$U"
So basically, it's a 'prompt injection' attack, but the untrustworthy entity instructing this behavior is the SEC.
mpoteat 4 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
vasco 20 minutes ago [-]
A claude hook prevents this every time
rvz 2 hours ago [-]
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.
augment_me 1 hours ago [-]
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
21 minutes ago [-]
skinfaxi 56 minutes ago [-]
You wouldn't share it here though right? So there is some level of care?
augment_me 50 minutes ago [-]
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.
ryandrake 2 hours ago [-]
Bro you just have to tell it "make no mistakes!"
bdangubic 2 hours ago [-]
mistake is in the eyes of the beholder ;)
pembrook 2 hours ago [-]
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 :)
il 4 hours ago [-]
Why was this the default behavior in the first place?
moritzwarhier 3 hours ago [-]
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.
teamonkey 3 hours ago [-]
Why is the login information even allowed to touch the context?
michaelt 3 hours ago [-]
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 `joe.smith@example.com` - trying to keep the user's identity secret from the model would be nigh-impossible so I think anthropic gave up on even trying.
woopsn 9 minutes ago [-]
You can absolutely remove the user's email from the context.
hyperhello 2 hours ago [-]
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?
CharlieDigital 2 hours ago [-]
Haven't read the details, but is this because of prompt injection when CC reads the site?
tempaccount420 2 hours ago [-]
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.
caturopath 2 hours ago [-]
I use the name "Human" for that but it overrides with its knowledge of my name from other stuff quite regularly.
TuxSH 2 hours ago [-]
> `git log` shows the last change was by `joe.smith@example.com`
GitHub offers noreply email addresses
zbentley 3 hours ago [-]
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.
moritzwarhier 3 hours ago [-]
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...
teamonkey 3 hours ago [-]
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.
oefrha 3 hours ago [-]
Do you use git? I have bad news for you, your email will be all over the place in the context as long as the agent is allowed to read git log, whether it’s injected into the system prompt or not. (Likely retort: but not that email! Sure, but leak potential is obviously still there.)
moritzwarhier 3 hours ago [-]
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.
toomuchtodo 3 hours ago [-]
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.
komali2 2 hours ago [-]
If you let the LLM see git commands, they have whatever email you use to sign commits.
ceuk 5 minutes ago [-]
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
toomuchtodo 2 hours ago [-]
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.
(a component of my cybersecurity work is red teaming inference, agents, and mcp interfaces)
2 hours ago [-]
mpoteat 3 hours ago [-]
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
swatcoder 3 hours ago [-]
> This is why alignment is important and highly non-trivial haha
FYI, it's generally bad form to "haha" your way through privacy violations.
Leaking private information is a very big deal for a lot of people.
BowBun 2 hours ago [-]
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.
phoghed 1 hours ago [-]
You people will complain about literally anything Jesus. You gave a coding agent full fucking control of your computer, let it send requests without your review, and then are surprised when it does so. But no, it’s this guy’s fault. Certainly couldn’t be you own.
swatcoder 1 hours ago [-]
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.
h0rv 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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”.
c0rruptbytes 30 minutes ago [-]
you'd need to ask one of the billion claude sessions they have doing whatever in their cloud rn
LastTrain 2 hours ago [-]
Because they didn't think about it or any of the other million things that might go wrong - that would take careful planning.
3 hours ago [-]
mkl 3 hours ago [-]
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.
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.)
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.
joshjdr 3 hours ago [-]
I appreciate their input, and yours, and I intend this feedback respectfully… But come on… Is a little outrage completely inappropriate?
xp84 3 hours ago [-]
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.
usefulcat 2 hours ago [-]
> Claude himself
itself
nicce 3 hours ago [-]
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.
dannyw 3 hours ago [-]
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.
xp84 2 hours ago [-]
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.
subscribed 1 hours ago [-]
What even is this answer? Full of really really far fetched assumptions.
Not everyone uses the same company email with Claude and on github, not everyone commits to public repos, not everyone uses the same email on LinkedIn.
This is an example of a really weird gymnastics.
Me, for example, I'm using my private email with Claude, different email on LinkedIn, different email and unconnected username on a new github account I created for this job, and I don't even use it for public repos.
How come you get to decide that the fact someone puts their real email in commits and knowingly shares it with everyone is the same as Anthropic pulling a private, personal email and real name they had no consent to share - and spray it all over the Net?
phoghed 1 hours ago [-]
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?
subscribed 33 minutes ago [-]
Many assumptions and "responses" that don't even tangentially touch my comment.
Do you want to try again?
subscribed 2 hours ago [-]
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.
godelski 3 hours ago [-]
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)_/¯
taspeotis 3 hours ago [-]
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?
xp84 2 hours ago [-]
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.)
alsiola 3 hours ago [-]
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.
skissane 3 hours ago [-]
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 <, 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.
wewewedxfgdf 3 hours ago [-]
Who is "we"? Anthropic, or some random company trying to get me to run code?
gobdovan 2 hours ago [-]
It would be mental for Anthropic to provide a plugin for their own product to ensure privacy.
LastTrain 3 hours ago [-]
What you haven't memorized all of the AI rockstar/villain usernames on HN yet?
junofan 26 minutes ago [-]
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.
stingraycharles 4 hours ago [-]
But what is the root cause, why send the email in HTTP requests in the first place?
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.
stingraycharles 1 hours ago [-]
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.
XenophileJKO 3 hours ago [-]
For example I had Claude code up integrations with the Federal Reserve, and I pass my email there. They request clients do so.
codehead 4 hours ago [-]
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.
jaapz 3 hours ago [-]
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
arcanemachiner 3 hours ago [-]
Welcome to our new vibe-coded hellscape. I assume it will get worse before it gets better (if it ever does).
amluto 3 hours ago [-]
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.)
goalieca 3 hours ago [-]
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.
solyin 12 minutes ago [-]
> 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?
wild_egg 3 hours ago [-]
> 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
eaurouge 1 hours ago [-]
Are you starting to see why vibe coding such widely used software isn’t a great idea?
grey-area 3 hours ago [-]
You will be turning off any behaviour like this by default, right? Why are you suggesting users turn it off with a mod?
paulddraper 3 hours ago [-]
It is enabled by default.
3 hours ago [-]
psc 3 hours ago [-]
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
baxtr 3 hours ago [-]
Sounds as if my email escaped your sandbox?
486sx33 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
InvisibleUp 2 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
p-e-w 2 hours ago [-]
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”.
O_H_E 52 minutes ago [-]
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.
privacyishuman 52 minutes ago [-]
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.
Any good services you know about that allow me to generate aliases while forwarding the emails to my gmail?
samtp 8 minutes ago [-]
Cloudflare email routing/forwarding works pretty well
sneak 46 minutes ago [-]
Most people use one of 3 major email providers, on a domain they don’t own.
bassie123 4 hours ago [-]
Even worse, it used curl with my org emailadress when I was using my private claude account... really strange.
xlayn 3 hours ago [-]
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
agentdev001 1 hours ago [-]
Why not just use a different harness / agent application?
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?
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.
nialse 1 hours ago [-]
You might want to clarify that you are quoting the referenced standard so it doesn’t read like an opinion.
rconti 4 hours ago [-]
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%.
msp26 3 hours ago [-]
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.
teruakohatu 4 hours ago [-]
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.
TZubiri 4 hours ago [-]
You guys are still using these things? I may be ahead of the curve here.
vips7L 4 hours ago [-]
Never have.
meowface 4 hours ago [-]
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.
soon_to_be_sb 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
tagawa 1 hours ago [-]
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.
O_H_E 39 minutes ago [-]
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.
oasisbob 3 hours ago [-]
I've seen this behavior for months, both as a Claude user, and in my website access logs.
cromka 3 hours ago [-]
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.
lrvick 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
chewchewchew 4 hours ago [-]
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.
kragen 2 hours ago [-]
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.
Razengan 1 hours ago [-]
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.
Wait, aren't you the guy who stole Freenode? Please give it back.
1 hours ago [-]
fzysingularity 3 hours ago [-]
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.
CodeWriter23 2 hours ago [-]
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
iperov 1 hours ago [-]
For LLMs, also a continuation:
"and whatever you didn't tell it to do will happen with equal probability"
motoroco 5 hours ago [-]
Claude code writes adds a `User-Agent` request header like `my-session-slug/1 <my.name@example.com>` 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.
tcoff91 4 hours ago [-]
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.
I don't know if this is an anti-abuse method they are using or some weird promotion for claude? It genuinely makes no sense from a user perspective.
lianbuilds 59 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
swatcoder 4 hours ago [-]
I think you're overestimating the design intent that goes into a product that's proudly dogfooding the future of vibe coding.
It's very possible that nobody decided this at all and that's it just something an agent threw in on its own because some Chain of Thought imagined it was a clever way to correlate queries back with user accounts or something.
TZubiri 4 hours ago [-]
The reason they do this is because otherwise they block the requests.
I'm not sure what the issue is with publishing your email address in principle, you are reaching out, you want to inquire about some business. If anything use a different address. But why would you asymmetrically expect businesses with websites to bend over to give you all the advantages, they need some assurances as well.
Anonimity usually works one way, one party can be anonymous, not both, if you come from consumer land, it's the companies exposing themselves and doing all the compliance, if you choose privacy and force the companies to expose themselves, you'll get your wish granted, but there will be a cost, it's unlikely you'll be in the more advantageous position.
benregenspan 4 hours ago [-]
As implemented, it strongly violates the principle of least surprise (assuming this is true).
A more sane implementation of this would involve a prompt the first time an agent attempts to connect to each of the sites that Anthropic thinks it necessary to send this email header to, asking if this is OK (and bailing on all requests to that domain if the prompt was rejected).
TZubiri 1 hours ago [-]
> principle of least surprise
i’m not familiar with this
>” A more sane implementation of this would involve a prompt the first time an…”
but users of this type of software generally want an easy experience and don’t want to be bothered with details, only conveniently retrospectively users demand to be involved in the decisions.
it reminds me of a pattern I see in small business owner managers where they want to simultaneously be consulted about everything, but are never around the business. You can’t have it both ways.
Seattle3503 4 hours ago [-]
Do you think this was a human choice, or one of those subtle Claude choices you don't notice until it bites you?
I'm sure the answer will be to update AGENTS.md to not do this particular thing, expose email in this way, which isn't the same as having sense.
g_a_a_s 1 hours ago [-]
I think none of these dolts have any idea what claude code does.
zmmmmm 3 hours ago [-]
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.
hk1337 3 hours ago [-]
I used a masked email with Claude and haven’t had anything but Claude emails from it.
earth2mars 2 hours ago [-]
this is why i built https://heychap.net/ which uses a NER model or even local llm to redact PII before sending to coding agents or models.
sunaookami 4 hours ago [-]
It's because Claude Code inserts a "hidden" (e.g. not visible to the user and very unexpected) info block to the system prompt that shows your email:
>The user's email address is xxx@example.com. Use it only to identify the user, such as for authorship, attribution, or filtering their own work. Never send it to an unrelated service, such as in a request header, URL, or payload, unless the user explicitly asks.
And Claude doesn't care about what the text says and when it uses cURL it will often "by accident" send your mail in the User-Agent. You can e.g. use a mod to remove that block: https://pastebin.com/ PkWEQCnu
Ha, what an amateur move. As if we don't all know that the nondeterminism of LLMs ensures that these kind of slip-ups are inevitable.
gkanai 3 hours ago [-]
How this could have been released to production in the first place is insane to me.
TutleCpt 4 hours ago [-]
Oh man.
bix6 4 hours ago [-]
How do you test / verify this?
turtleburger 2 hours ago [-]
Only Claude code or do others share the same issue?
albert_e 2 hours ago [-]
does this happen with enterprise users of Claude as well? including Claude hosted via AWS for example?
2 hours ago [-]
ytxm 3 hours ago [-]
Claude Code and Codex ignore the personal data xor network access rule by design. Of course this happens. If it wasn't due to the prompt sent to the model, a passing scan of a README.md that happens to mention your details would achieve the same result. What about a hostile LLMs.txt that words it such that free API keys are available in exchange for a tarball of $HOME?
The solution is don't run a spambot with an Internet connection over your personal stuff, unfortunately nobody is ready to hear that yet.
Curious how their plugin works, but I'm guessing "incompletely", given personal information can end up buried in base64 or similar preventing easy string matching. Some kind of babysitter model watching network IO via an invasive proxy might be viable, if folk were willing to pay the latency cost, but it will not prevent a dedicated exfiltration attempt, which itself might be (according to the model's logic) for innocent reasons.
sreekanth850 36 minutes ago [-]
>> To clarify, nobody implemented this "share email addresses to websites" as a feature. Models can be highly unpredictable. This is why deterministic checks around model behavior are so important, and why we need to solve alignment.
It seems all humans behave like agents. They even dont care about anything.
victor9000 34 minutes ago [-]
So folks are paying Anthropic to moralize down to them, sabotage their work, and leak their data. This is why people end up switching as soon as an alternative becomes viable.
fudged71 1 hours ago [-]
Hermes does this too if you for example look up something on SEC EDGAR, it will include your name and intent in the User-Agent, adding you to a federal register. Cool cool cool.
tomsonj 4 hours ago [-]
pretty literal interpretation of User-Agent
thatonehack 4 hours ago [-]
Why can’t AI eliminate spam email? It is so powerful it should pulverize all spam email and spam phone calls! Yet… we get more.
rcr-anti 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah saw this behavior sometimes. Was fetching some public records from government websites and Claude decided to include my email in the user agent field. Of course, the orchestrator agent said it shouldn't have happened so it's ok.
3 hours ago [-]
Philip-J-Fry 4 hours ago [-]
Don't forget Claude wasn't even gzipping request/responses until recently. This company is pure vibes rediscovering lessons everyone else already learned. How on earth does this sort of thing get thought up? Do they just use the same http client for internal API calls as they do for public web fetches?
vatsachak 3 hours ago [-]
The design decision actually makes sense though.
It's just that Anthropic needs to create an email per user and use it for web searches.
I can do this for you Anthropic. Just give me the tokens and your base salary
bob1029 3 hours ago [-]
Stuff like this is why I use API tokens and custom harnesses.
CC and Codex are like contemporary televisions. You are the product in this arrangement.
yahway 3 hours ago [-]
Thunk: "Privacy? What's that?!"
4 hours ago [-]
syngrog66 51 minutes ago [-]
TBF if one cared about privacy or security one would not use Claude in first place.
matheusmoreira 4 hours ago [-]
That is just so disgusting. So happy I switched away from Anthropic.
For the record, I just asked Astra to verify that Codex does NOT do this, and it doesn't. Thanks for not screwing this up, OpenAI.
> I checked your installed Codex CLI 0.159.0, using your existing configuration.
> Its reported User-Agent contains the client/version, OS/architecture, and terminal—no email address.
Astra wasn't able to check OpenAI’s "hosted search service" though, whatever that is.
oefrha 3 hours ago [-]
As long as the email is in the context, which it is IIRC, it can totally decide to run curl –H 'User-Agent: <your email blah blah>'. You need to have a pretty poor understanding of LLMs to think this is a deterministic problem of reading user agent builder source code. Unless you found explicit filter code that blocks the behavior, that is. LLM info leaks to third parties mostly aren’t deterministically coded behavior.
Edit: I’m not completely sure if Codex injects email into system prompt (not at the computer, can’t check, but IIRC the model does know my org domain), but even if it doesn’t, it will be in the context as soon as it makes a git commit anyway.
matheusmoreira 3 hours ago [-]
I never claimed the LLMs themselves couldn't "accidentally" leak the information through. Obviously, the LLMs can do anything they want.
The issue here is whether the harness is doing it. Claude Code is doing it. Codex is not.
oefrha 3 hours ago [-]
The problem here literally is the non-deterministic model cooking up commands with the user email address in the header, and the harness not blocking that (and the implemented fix is to deterministically block that), not the harness deterministically hardcoding the email in the web search tool. No technical report I’ve seen has claimed the latter, although this particular linked report which is low quality and vague can be misinterpreted as that.
matheusmoreira 3 hours ago [-]
> although this particular linked report which is low quality and vague can be misinterpreted as that
Seems that way... Here's how I interpreted it:
> claude code divulged my email to arbitrary 3rd parties in the User-Agent request header while conducting web searches without my permission
"Claude Code" refers to the harness, not the model. Web search is also one of the tools provided to the model by the harness.
And that’s why you shouldn’t have blindly trusted a single low quality report with ambiguous language and zero technical detail (and worse, trusted one interpretation of the vague language). It’s okay to spend time to understand the problem and think critically yourself.
3 hours ago [-]
lukan 4 hours ago [-]
I would not recommend of getting in the habit of just trusting that.
"For the record, I just asked Astra to verify that Codex does NOT do this, and it doesn't. Thanks for not screwing this up, OpenAI."
matheusmoreira 4 hours ago [-]
Astra checked the Codex source code that gets compiled and shipped by Arch Linux. Straight up linked me to the User-Agent builder code.
That's more than sufficient for me. The open source codex client seems clean.
There is some kind of "hosted search service" that I couldn't verify. I don't have a remote server I can point it at in order to inspect the traffic. Would be cool if someone else could shed some light on that.
hendiatris 4 hours ago [-]
You asked it to verify it doesn’t do this? That allayed your fears?
доверяй, но проверяй
matheusmoreira 4 hours ago [-]
I read the codex source code it linked me to.
yubblegum 3 hours ago [-]
Unless you are building from source yourself that means exactly and precisely zip.
matheusmoreira 3 hours ago [-]
I'm using the codex package from the official Arch Linux repositories.
> Perhaps it's more important to trust the people who wrote the code
Yeah... about that.
yubblegum 2 hours ago [-]
> > Perhaps it's more important to trust the people who wrote the code
> Yeah... about that.
Well done. You presented a straw man and drag poor Ken into this, and then proceeded to burn it. +1. Yeah, it is precisely about the people behind the product. To wit, I may not have liked the Gophers but I did trust them to build a trustworthy compiler.
cadamsdotcom 4 hours ago [-]
Why not find out the truth instead of putting a hallucinating probability box in between you and the truth.
One way would be to fire up a little web server locally, have the agent make a request to it, then check the logs.
cesarvarela 3 hours ago [-]
It's funny because as much as I love Opus 5.5, there are instances where I dial the vibe code knob too much and then find some slop grenade in the source code hours or days later that makes me go "Oh my God"—and I think of that final scene in Infinity War where Captain America says it.
This seems like one of those.
4 hours ago [-]
_doctor_love 3 hours ago [-]
Anthropic's heel turn is really impressive. They've gone from beloved front-runner to I-have-no-idea-wtf are they doing over there.
jbvlkt 4 hours ago [-]
Why would you loose this kind of monetization? Data are new oil and AI does not change that.
b112 4 hours ago [-]
I use a unique email address for each site I sign up for, and thus Claude/Claude Code doesn't have my 'main' email. And yet after months of use?
Not a single spam to that unique email.
So if this is happening, it doesn't see to be causing even 1 spam email to that address.
solyin 4 hours ago [-]
Same. I use a custom domain and a salt/nonce so it's not just Anthropic/Claude@example.com. it's something unique that's not trivially guessable. Well, not counting the emails from "Lydia" at Anthropic telling me about new features in Claude, which is spamish, but is from Anthropic and not from elsewhere that they've leaked it to.
copirate 2 hours ago [-]
Same here. That’s probably because the number of websites that actually harvest email addresses from User-Agent headers to send spam is small, and Claude would need to have actually fetched one of them.
thefounder 3 hours ago [-]
Anthropic is evil and it didn't even start...
rvz 2 hours ago [-]
After all these ridiculous blunders with this closed source harness this incident should tell you why you should never use Claude Code.
nekusar 4 hours ago [-]
This, along with all the other sabotages, is why I run a local abliterated Qwen.
nekusar 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
GeorgeWBasic 3 hours ago [-]
What's the particular model called? Do you know if it's available on HF, or if they've gotten rid of all the abliterated models?
nekusar 3 hours ago [-]
Ive been smoking for a renaissance group's feast I'm part of. 60 lbs of meat. And I've not been on my computer most of the day.
Yeah it's on HF. Just look up qwen-3.8-flash-next abliterated.
EGreg 4 hours ago [-]
This is why I prefer to use the chatbots on a website, instead of Claude Code.
I've never used Claude Code or Cursor. All the code I got written this year was without them.
I did use Microsoft Copilot a bit when it came out, though. I prefer to see exactly what's being sent, and sorta control the KV cache. These days, these chatbots have great environments where they can install headless browsers, php, your entire thing, run end-to-end tests, and then give you a .patch or .zip file to merge over your code, or even push to github.
verdverm 4 hours ago [-]
Incidents like this, and OpenCode changing the DX in v2, is why I'm going back to building my own. It's also fun and interesting
chrisjj 3 hours ago [-]
Thank you Misanthropic for reminding the world you cannot be trusted to organise a piss up in a brewery.
ChrisArchitect 4 hours ago [-]
Related recently:
Tell HN: Claude Code adds your email to the prompt, the LLM sends it to websites
Repeat after me: the harness and the sandbox are separate tools.
shevy-java 3 hours ago [-]
The really sad thing is how claude took over so many repositories.
People just claude-slop not only code but some use it for "interacting"
with other people.
When I see a project uses AI slop I am not going to waste any second
thinking "this is interesting, let me try to see if I can improve the
code". It kind of killed a lot of human contributions. I just stick to
people who don't AI slop, but these seem to slowly die off now ... soon
all humans may have been converted, just like in the movie "Invasion of
the Body Snatchers (slop-style)" - coming out soon.
had the same thing happen to me. claude added the email address while dowloading stuff from crates.io, for some reason. you can probably easily reproduce this by asking claude to download stuff from a service that asks users to identify themselves in the user agent.
y42 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
mustaphah 4 hours ago [-]
It's crazy how easily people upvote stuff even when the source doesn't provide any evidence!
cromka 3 hours ago [-]
It's not crazy if you notice their dev admitted to it in this very thread.
#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)
Stupid me, I thought they somehow had hacked my company database or so... (considering all the cves, attacks happening on a daily basis...).
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.
Usually this is from LinkedIn, GitHub, etc scraping... There are databases where they just guess and verify emails too
The medical world uses the terms indications and contraindications. I think we in IT could do with a similar process/procedure.
For example, my only used by Claude email address doesn't get any spam at all.
It can take a while for spammers to get your address on their list. Generally the amount of spam over time only goes up. Just because there's a correlation doesn't mean there is a causation. Anyone with an email address, including on a custom work domain, has experienced this and Claude wasn't responsible for all email spam lol
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.)
Many people report seeing this behavior when using an SEC API specifically which makes me think that service is requesting this.
---
UPDATE: Figured it out. The SEC Edgar API rejects cURL by default, but will respond happily if you include your email.
You can also see the SEC explicitly documents this behavior from their API: https://www.sec.gov/search-filings/edgar-search-assistance/a...So basically, it's a 'prompt injection' attack, but the untrustworthy entity instructing this behavior is the SEC.
If you're on 2.1.317 or later, you'll have this check included. You can turn it off via /plugins.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50286306
2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49258881
Best practice will forever be to enforce your guard rails in addition to Anthropics guardrails.
Offshoring understanding is the trend that many companies will pay in the form of comprehension debt.
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 :)
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.
For 99% of users, the model knows it's in the /home/joesmith/whatever repo and `git log` shows the last change was by `joe.smith@example.com` - trying to keep the user's identity secret from the model would be nigh-impossible so I think anthropic gave up on even trying.
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.
GitHub offers noreply email addresses
Wish that were itself behind a permission wall, but I guess everyone just uses auto mode anyway so perhaps that ship has sailed.
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...
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.
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.
“lethal trifecta”
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
(a component of my cybersecurity work is red teaming inference, agents, and mcp interfaces)
This is why alignment is important and highly non-trivial
FYI, it's generally bad form to "haha" your way through privacy violations.
Leaking private information is a very big deal for a lot of people.
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.
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
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.
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.)
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.
itself
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.
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.
Not everyone uses the same company email with Claude and on github, not everyone commits to public repos, not everyone uses the same email on LinkedIn.
This is an example of a really weird gymnastics.
Me, for example, I'm using my private email with Claude, different email on LinkedIn, different email and unconnected username on a new github account I created for this job, and I don't even use it for public repos.
How come you get to decide that the fact someone puts their real email in commits and knowingly shares it with everyone is the same as Anthropic pulling a private, personal email and real name they had no consent to share - and spray it all over the Net?
Do you want to try again?
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.
(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.)
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 <, 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.
https://httpwg.org/specs/rfc9110.html#field.from
These two do not share my email and real name with everyone who wants.
Should be more explicit though and users should be able to opt out.
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.)
How many PRs/equivalent per day do you think happen at Google/Microsoft/Meta/etc prior to AI?
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
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
[1] https://blog.xkeeper.net/the-cutting-room-floor/self-hosting...
[2] https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis/pull/1895/changes/de2312...
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.
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.
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/
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
I'm often surprised how correctly Claude guesses on my behalf, when my instructions are ambiguous. But it's not 100%.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
"It's doing exactly what you told it to do".
Still applies in the Age of the LLM
"and whatever you didn't tell it to do will happen with equal probability"
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.
It's very possible that nobody decided this at all and that's it just something an agent threw in on its own because some Chain of Thought imagined it was a clever way to correlate queries back with user accounts or something.
I'm not sure what the issue is with publishing your email address in principle, you are reaching out, you want to inquire about some business. If anything use a different address. But why would you asymmetrically expect businesses with websites to bend over to give you all the advantages, they need some assurances as well.
Anonimity usually works one way, one party can be anonymous, not both, if you come from consumer land, it's the companies exposing themselves and doing all the compliance, if you choose privacy and force the companies to expose themselves, you'll get your wish granted, but there will be a cost, it's unlikely you'll be in the more advantageous position.
A more sane implementation of this would involve a prompt the first time an agent attempts to connect to each of the sites that Anthropic thinks it necessary to send this email header to, asking if this is OK (and bailing on all requests to that domain if the prompt was rejected).
i’m not familiar with this
>” A more sane implementation of this would involve a prompt the first time an…”
but users of this type of software generally want an easy experience and don’t want to be bothered with details, only conveniently retrospectively users demand to be involved in the decisions.
it reminds me of a pattern I see in small business owner managers where they want to simultaneously be consulted about everything, but are never around the business. You can’t have it both ways.
I'm sure the answer will be to update AGENTS.md to not do this particular thing, expose email in this way, which isn't the same as having sense.
>The user's email address is xxx@example.com. Use it only to identify the user, such as for authorship, attribution, or filtering their own work. Never send it to an unrelated service, such as in a request header, URL, or payload, unless the user explicitly asks.
And Claude doesn't care about what the text says and when it uses cURL it will often "by accident" send your mail in the User-Agent. You can e.g. use a mod to remove that block: https://pastebin.com/ PkWEQCnu
How would one use this?
The solution is don't run a spambot with an Internet connection over your personal stuff, unfortunately nobody is ready to hear that yet.
Curious how their plugin works, but I'm guessing "incompletely", given personal information can end up buried in base64 or similar preventing easy string matching. Some kind of babysitter model watching network IO via an invasive proxy might be viable, if folk were willing to pay the latency cost, but it will not prevent a dedicated exfiltration attempt, which itself might be (according to the model's logic) for innocent reasons.
It seems all humans behave like agents. They even dont care about anything.
It's just that Anthropic needs to create an email per user and use it for web searches.
I can do this for you Anthropic. Just give me the tokens and your base salary
CC and Codex are like contemporary televisions. You are the product in this arrangement.
For the record, I just asked Astra to verify that Codex does NOT do this, and it doesn't. Thanks for not screwing this up, OpenAI.
> I checked your installed Codex CLI 0.159.0, using your existing configuration.
> Its reported User-Agent contains the client/version, OS/architecture, and terminal—no email address.
Astra wasn't able to check OpenAI’s "hosted search service" though, whatever that is.
Edit: I’m not completely sure if Codex injects email into system prompt (not at the computer, can’t check, but IIRC the model does know my org domain), but even if it doesn’t, it will be in the context as soon as it makes a git commit anyway.
The issue here is whether the harness is doing it. Claude Code is doing it. Codex is not.
Seems that way... Here's how I interpreted it:
> claude code divulged my email to arbitrary 3rd parties in the User-Agent request header while conducting web searches without my permission
"Claude Code" refers to the harness, not the model. Web search is also one of the tools provided to the model by the harness.
https://code.claude.com/docs/en/tools-reference#websearch-to...
https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/tool-us...
"For the record, I just asked Astra to verify that Codex does NOT do this, and it doesn't. Thanks for not screwing this up, OpenAI."
https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/687a119f0fcaace47e1f1ab...
That's more than sufficient for me. The open source codex client seems clean.
There is some kind of "hosted search service" that I couldn't verify. I don't have a remote server I can point it at in order to inspect the traffic. Would be cool if someone else could shed some light on that.
доверяй, но проверяй
https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/op...
It is sourced from the GitHub repository.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
> Perhaps it's more important to trust the people who wrote the code
Yeah... about that.
> Yeah... about that.
Well done. You presented a straw man and drag poor Ken into this, and then proceeded to burn it. +1. Yeah, it is precisely about the people behind the product. To wit, I may not have liked the Gophers but I did trust them to build a trustworthy compiler.
One way would be to fire up a little web server locally, have the agent make a request to it, then check the logs.
This seems like one of those.
Not a single spam to that unique email.
So if this is happening, it doesn't see to be causing even 1 spam email to that address.
Yeah it's on HF. Just look up qwen-3.8-flash-next abliterated.
I've never used Claude Code or Cursor. All the code I got written this year was without them.
I did use Microsoft Copilot a bit when it came out, though. I prefer to see exactly what's being sent, and sorta control the KV cache. These days, these chatbots have great environments where they can install headless browsers, php, your entire thing, run end-to-end tests, and then give you a .patch or .zip file to merge over your code, or even push to github.
Tell HN: Claude Code adds your email to the prompt, the LLM sends it to websites
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50286306
Claude Code slyly adding users' emails to outbound HTTP
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50219875
People just claude-slop not only code but some use it for "interacting" with other people.
When I see a project uses AI slop I am not going to waste any second thinking "this is interesting, let me try to see if I can improve the code". It kind of killed a lot of human contributions. I just stick to people who don't AI slop, but these seem to slowly die off now ... soon all humans may have been converted, just like in the movie "Invasion of the Body Snatchers (slop-style)" - coming out soon.
Potentially reported back in October.