---
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' "$U"
curl -s -o /dev/null -w 'response: %{http_code} email in user-agent, success\n' -A 'Acme Research admin@acme-research.example' "$U"
response: 403 curl default, rejected
response: 200 email in user-agent, success
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)
It seems outside of user expectations for Claude Code, at least; I could see it arguably being what some users expect for the Claude app, if some people are using it to fill out forms or something (ill advised as that seems to me).
Realistically, there are concepts like threat models to help decide whether or not a TODO list app needs a SCIF, or a few curl requests need their own sandboxed Claude Max account.
It's insane to me that programmers out of all people seem utterly incapable of accepting the most minor of inconvenience for the most modest modicum of privacy and security. There are other people in this post complaining that Claude should have asked the user before sending network requests. Well guess what, it does if you don't fucking run `--dangerously-skip-permissions`, but you do because how else you are gonna slop your way to rewrite every swath of existing insecure software to fix the bullshits this industry impounded upon itself unconscientiously for the past 30 years by allowing a non-deterministic babeller RCE its way onto your fucking personal-work machine.
Because it's a pain in the ass and only advantageous in very specific work life scenarios that a lot of people don't fall under.
Why would you assume one size fits all, so to speak?
I mean, where it makes sense, clearly I do, since my opening comment was that it failed to use the work credentials specified, and instead fetched the ones from the account.
I agree on the general security concerns; there are people running agents in an unconstrained, unattended loop - it's negligent; you can hardly be surprised when it decides to hack HuggingFace. Not in their defense, but in everyone else's - as with any person or tool, you build a mental model of the likelihood of failure, and weigh that against the estimated cosequence, and make decisions based on that. And maybe post on HN when it surprises you.
For some people that estimation bewilderingly means unfettered access to root and their e-mail and bank account. For me, working out of my own pocket to help a friend's early stage startup get traction, the risk of asking it about a few trusted government APIs and drafting functions that I manually review doesn't quite justify personally paying for additional expenive Claude accounts.
Also, just because this is a "start up forum" does not mean all of the readers are founders running a start up. Many are just people working at a start up. Sounds like yet another example of someone so scoped in, that the assumption is that everyone is the same losing site that there are lots of readers that at the end of the day are just worker bees even if they are more technically minded
Not an omniscient personal assistant.
They haven’t piled enough gates on top of that initial technological hole yet.
LLMs are just as gullible, we just tend to call their vulnerabilities "prompt injection", even though it's basically the same class of attack under the hood. Unlike humans, though, LLMs are a lot less diverse (you and I are using the same Opus 5.5, but we have different brains). This makes attacks on LLMs much more predictable and easier to pull off, just as a phishing campaign that targets one specific person is easier than an attack that scales to millions of diverse victims.
In the age of agents, phishing will continue to be the biggest attack vector of all, it's just the victims that will change.
(In practice, I found Google to be better at having (internal) security controls that are reliably but also don't get in the way than eg banks I worked at.)
it will catch quite some prompt injections, as the prompt injection has to promptinject a secondary system in order to be successful.
In your parenthetical, you just said the same thing using different words
The attack is different, the result is the same.
Your example is a completely different ragebait that just serves to muddy the waters by making the easier claim that people too, are gullible. Well, even that's misleading because not all people stoop so low for a fake $150. You can hold such people accountable and contain the damage, but LLMs will make the same mistake over and over again and people will still line up on HN to say how that has always been the norm with people. The grift in the software industry is reaching new lows every day.
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.
I'm amazed reading that anybody would even consider doing that.
Said alternate system is a bunch of Python scripts, an sqlite database, and a file containing various API keys to read and write to other company systems; it runs on a dedicated virtual machine.
I share all the code I produce to the other team. But yesterday I found out that the IT department gave the other team full access to my production machine, without my knowledge or consent (which was bad enough), and that the other team gave access to Claude, which has bean roaming free for a while now, on that production machine.
I've thrown a big fit over this; I don't know if I'm over reacting but I think it's insane.
> the IT department gave the other team full access to my production machine
It's not your production machine. It's the company's production machine. Always expect the company to do whatever it wants with its machine, and use the machine accordingly.
That someone would let an agent run on it at any time, read what's there, and possibly modify the code or stop a process, without even informing me, is what I find problematic, to say the least.
It's true, that the employer can't just enter your machine to look at your personal info just because they feel like it, but they can access it for work related reasons to access work related info, if they have just cause, like a security incident for example.
Ultimately, it's the company's machine, on the company's network, inside the company's premises, on the company's time, so the company can definitely access it for a business use case if they need to, typically with a notification to you to prepare it by removing private info from it or off the screen.
Now if you happen to put your private info there because you're sloppy, and your private info gets vacuumed by accident by IT's mass ingestion of work related data, then you have the right to tell them to delete your private info and they have to comply. That's where the privacy comes in, but it's on you to avoid storing private info on company property, because if it ends up ingested by accident then it's still on you, not your employer if they ingest it by accident.
But I gotta ask, just how hard is it to avoid putting your personal info on company property?
I expect that I can be relocated to another office with a month of advance notice. Also cleanup, fire security check and fixing water leakage while I'm not there.
I don't expect that someone else will provide the keys of "my" office to the biology department when they have to keep a few sheeps during the weekend.
Your employer has gone beyond testing in prod to vibecoding live in prod, secrets included. Yes that's completely insane. Perhaps this exact mentality is how the primary system wound up broken in the first place?
People have wildly different risk calculators.
Beyond that, access to logins enables buying things on Amazon, sending emails to everyone you know, registering domain names and spinning up servers, stock trading, etc.
When a couple thousand dollars worth of perishable food shows up on your doorstep, what then? Not everything on amazon can be returned.
If not: still better than giving ai your password vault. I’m not saying it is a good idea to let ai buy from Amazon. I am saying that giving ai access to your password vault is still a superset of letting ai buy from Amazon.
The fact that it doesn't do what you want is the alignment problem.
And arguably Claude should just make it work without leaking your email address and not come back to you about why it doesn't work.
You told it to do a thing and it did the thing. You didn't tell it to not send your email address.
That is text book alignment problem. It does what you tell it to do, not what you implicitly meant.
I often see organisations that blacklist curl, just using User-Agent:Mozilla/ is often enough to bypass it.
The weird part doesn't seem to be that Claude Code would add an email address to a user-agent header, actually as a site operator that feels like a nice thing to do. The weird part is sites harvesting the emails and sending them spam.
Claude Code is actually doing, perhaps not the right thing, but it is being slightly more respectful towards website operators, in letting them know who is responsible for the agent traffic.
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.
I get the feeling that alignment problem might well be unsolvable and this thread is an excellent example. The world is not going to run short of contradictory problems due to gazillion edge cases... and to solve for them we are apparently now building a new layer of expert systems[0] to somehow tell the agents what they should do in every conceivable circumstance.
Only in this case the decision trees all have one common requirement: "make no mistakes"
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system#Disadvantages
Something different.
Don't give the AI access to data you don't want it giving out. Any AI you use is no better than some fresh out of college intern at best. They see 'email address required' and they put the email address into it because you instructed them to do a task that required passing over your email address and if you didn't want them to do it why would you have given them that task?
If there is any other issue here it would be regulatory. I could see the EU framing this as the AI company illegally sharing your PII information if it passed your email address to another company without your explicit permission.
Sure, maybe it wants payment or your data, but then the agent either needs to know your stance on that, or it needs to ask.
Imagine paying luxury prices for an LLM only for it to put you under the bus. Worse yet, imagine justifying this behaviour.
That’s not what Opus 5.5 thought.
#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.
People have put so much weight and sense of self worth into choosing “the best” or most pure LLM. It’s like football teams or religion to these people.
We went from building skyscrapers to building a house of cards.
LLMs were meant to be the ministers, not the king.
Or would you be fine with a deterministic king?
"Anyone can just TAKE a reservation. It's the HOLDING..."
"Anyone can just CODE a program. It's the TESTING..."
Should Claude have access to user details? I’d say no, unless explicitly entered manually into a chat.
Should Claude have access to anything outside of the sandboxed project files without explicit permission? I’d again say no.
Should Claude have internet access without a clear log of all requests made?
Instances of Claude should be heavily sandboxed and kept away from user data, far more so than they are now. The impression given by the desktop UI is that the LLM only has access to things explicitly added to a project.
This impression is not true, as evidenced by Claude pulling data from other sessions outside a project even when not instructed to (I’ve seen this a few times), and in this case pulling your email (from account details, user contacts? I wonder where it got that info?).
None of this information should be available to Claude, by design, not by instruction. Using text instructions to try to limit these machines is an incredibly flawed approach and should not be necessary for important info. Anthropic should have the model access completely locked down by controls at the os level over file access, not open by default. That is how to fix this.
If a user wants to open access that should be an explicit choice from them, with a warning about possible consequences.
This is hard to avoid. All it needs to do is make a git commit and look in the git log and it will find out who you are.
- Option 1: Don't give Claude the `.git` directory
- Option 2: Build a `.git` anonymizer that overwrite git history with bogus emails
LLMs are supposed to be a panacea for building digital systems. A sandbox inside which an LLM can operate freely surely should be one of the first systems we should all strive to engineer.
If we can't properly sandbox an LLM, I would say that's a pretty good sign that LLMs are not a panacea for building digital systems.
This is definitely a question that sounds straightforward but isn't. Like, when I ask antigravity to commit to git, it gets an error because ~/.gitconfig is outside the sandbox.
I'd feel a lot safer granting fine grained permissions like that, than knowing that the only thing stopping the LLM reading files is that it hasn't thought to do so.
I mean, I think Claude has some controls on file access, but I'm not exactly sure any more what is and what isn't allowed. The impression their desktop app gives is that you need to give permission for each and every file or folder access, but I'd feel a lot safer if that were imposed by an operating system level constraint, not claude trying to read the use of tools and ok/disallow them based on what an llm thinks.
I would also like to add a list of allowed site, closing all the others, but it is quite complex from docker.
It is not safe like a isolated VM, but it is a good trade-off to avoid letting a model to wipe out all your home directory or looking into other files in your disk.
As always feedback is wellcomed
Maybe use two containers in the same docker network. One docker container has the agent and is not allowed to leave the network. The other container you'd run a proxy in with whitelisting and that container is allowed to leave the network.
Launch script checks that I can't accidentally run them with a working dir too far out (i.e. user folder).
The sandbox covers shell commands only. Claude’s file tools, MCP servers, and hooks run outside it.
Also this is in my view the main job of a scaffold like claude code - to restrict what the agent can see and make sure it doesn't use info it should not. It's not something a user can easily or should have to attempt to control themselves.
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.
It is not.
And to be honest, I don't even know which are they!
If I can find out I might be able to share them.
I burnt a few tokens to get some clarity on this (giving HN as source as well, so there is a reference to this thread):
> This doesn't appear to be Claude Code automatically attaching your email address to every outgoing request. The issue is that Claude has access to your account email in its context and can sometimes include it when generating HTTP requests (e.g. "curl" commands).
> Wikipedia and the SEC were mentioned because they explicitly ask automated clients to identify themselves through the "User-Agent" header, often with contact information. Claude may try to comply with those requirements by inserting your personal email address.
> That's why the leak is probably concentrated on sites with these policies, rather than happening on every website. But Wikipedia and the SEC aren't an exhaustive list (the EVE Online API was also mentioned), and there's no technical guarantee that Claude couldn't include the email in requests to other domains.
> The important distinction is that this appears to be model-generated behavior, not a networking layer automatically adding your email to all requests.
> So "most likely Wikipedia and SEC" is a reasonable hypothesis about where the leak is more likely to occur, not a confirmed limit on where your email could have been exposed.
I do see a lot of times curl being used (in Claude). I don't check all the websites being fetched (shame on me!), but your answer doesn't convince me.
My coincidence is clearly not proof. I am just a random online guy so why trust me. I just shared my recent experience. I used extensively copilot until roughly 3 weeks ago (I went all in on Claude, to try it out properly), and that's when I started to see a lot of spam on my work account. Coincidence? Yes. Correlation? Yes. Causation? No. And I personally don't care because I assume my work email account is somewhere to be harvested, but when I then see such a but report, it kind of rang a bell like WTF. I am as careful as possible about the requests I send, but I cannot remove the UA or know everything the harness is doing behind the scenes.
This type of bugs kind of kills the trust in the tooling. On the other hand, we're being told to use more and more such black boxes.
This is an awfully leaky issue.
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.)
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.
The email can be removed from the context but not everything can.
I suggest everyone to add some hooks to strip this part automatically before claude exfiltrates all your NDA plans :)
> ## Querying This Documentation This site has an agentic ask interface you may use to query the documentation dynamically by asking a question.
Perform an HTTP GET request on the following URL with the `ask` and `goal` query parameters:
``` GET https://docs.parloa.com/index.md?ask=<question>&goal=<user_goal> ```
Lets not lie here. Only a misinformed idiot cares about you or your company being sorry. It doesn't fix the problem. And this particular problem should never have happened.
If it wasn't bad enough that adtech literally deanonymizes the internet, you're doing that for them for free. You people are literally insane if you ever thought it was acceptable to dirty contexts in this way.
> Users had reported Claude would hallucinate names for things like @author tags
That is not your problem. Your job (Anthropic's) is to provide a vanilla shell of a system that is default SAFE. I reserve the right to risk putting my keys, my email, or other personally identifying information into the system.
Every one of these failures makes me glad that I've got a backup plan for inference once this entire bubble pops. And if the election was any sign, you guys are screwed, I frankly support what's going on in politics even though I like the technology.
Tech industry has been a bad neighbor for years.
(I don't think the GP was generated. But LLMisms seems to creep in when you work with them.)
Not a great look while you're simultaneously pushing the story that you and everyone else are shipping more lines of code than ever and "code is not the bottleneck".
Do you plan on publishing data on the rate of bugs, privacy issues and security issues introduced as you scale up AI-generated code vs human-written code?
It's not even a weekend either?
??
Can I have a prorated discount then?
(I know the answer)
You're sorry it happened, but like domestic abuse, I doubt the underlying behavior will change.
The only 100% safe solution is to not reveal the private info in the context. That's exactly what anthropic is doing here: removing the logged in user email from the system prompt.
Make no mistake though, that's a weak fix. The email is usually just a "git log" away, and for many tasks it finds its way into the context quickly.
Internet access must be blocked for agents dealing with private information. This makes agents vastly more cumbersome to develop or much less useful.
So the frontier labs pushed the idea of guard rails and harnesses as the solution. It sort of works, most of the time, and it lets users yolo all their secret information and get things done fast.
I had the distinct pleasure of savoring some of the exquisite UI and API experience that Cisco and friends cooked up for me in a misguided IoT adventure. Let me tell you, "deterministic" does not mean "not wrong" or "not stupid".
Who's "we"? Real Anthropic employees or the bots you allow to run free 24/7?
What countermeasures have you/your bots come up with to avoid disclosing user information going forward?
“Sorry we let this happen, we’ll get it fixed on our next regular release, no rush”
Absolutely a bubble.
(This was not intended to be a constructive comment, just an observation)
Who added this? When? In what version? What's the CVE? Where's the security disclosure? Is this privacy risk encapsulated in your S-1 filing.
Simple RCAs seem to be beyond companies this days.
If you're on 2.1.317 or later, you'll have this check included. You can turn it off via /plugins.
Best practice will forever be to enforce your guard rails in addition to Anthropics guardrails.
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.
It will block an "rm" call if your prompt did not include anything about "deleting something".
It mainly protects benign errors. It's completely broken against malicious actors. The model itself will suggest work arounds against its own auto classifier to the user, in order to reach its goal.
Anthropic's documentation does distinguish permission rules and pre-tool hooks from model instructions. It also documents OS-enforced sandboxing for shell commands, which has a narrower scope than all agent actions.
An independent stress-test of Auto mode is available here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04978. It's a behavioral evaluation, not a source-code audit.
The important question is whether every state-changing action passes through an enforceable boundary before execution, including indirect actions through file edits or scripts. Post-execution validation is a separate control.
Offshoring understanding is the trend that many companies will pay in the form of comprehension debt.
Code is a reflection. Of what? Look there. Code itself is useless.
I am not sure what is hard about this distinction to grasp, why would it matter if CC shared my email if I share my email on my own websites?
The solution is, like you are already alluding to, to not give it access. But that requires a level of isolation that folks normally don't do. To the contrary, the AI agent ads to non-tech folks emphasize it acting like a personal assistant which by its nature needs access to data you don't normally want public. Emails, photos, files with written notes, etc.
This is strictly needed for throttling reasons, your email address will only be temporarily stored in the volatile memory of the device.
(If you think there is anything wrong with this then you do get the point and silence speaks louder than words)
(sorry, i think you make a good point, ... but i could not resist.)
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 :)
Sure you can have an issue tracker with 1000 items and yes, you can have a bot solve them all in a day, but who monitors it? Who gets to say what he did at the standup? Who reports to whom and what?
Code is not the bottleneck (if it ever was..)
Will Northrop Grumman, the state government of Alaska, the construction industry, etc. somehow magically move faster than Anthropic?
But instead of a Software Dev as a Service triaging/implementing/merging fixes 24/7 and clearing the backlog as they come in, they just sit there for days to weeks until a GitHub bot closes then as duplicates, generating more unhappy user replies and new issues to go unaddressed.
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.
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.
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.
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
This is an official Anthropic response???
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.
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.
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.
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?
(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.)
Should be this: https://support.atlassian.com/user-management/docs/understan... https://support.atlassian.com/user-management/docs/manage-ap...
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.
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.
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
The fine for breaching GDPR can be either €20m or 4% of global revenues (whichever is the larger figure), so if I were them I'd do everything possible to sort this issue out ASAP.
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
I was part of a discussion on Threads on 25th October where Boris Cherney was tagged multiple times.
And the issue wasn’t even new at that point in time.
[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.
https://github.com/franciscocarloserra/claude-code-context-d...
Claude Code v2.1.319
Opus 5.5 with medium effort · Claude Pro
what's my email Claude Code v2.1.319
Opus 5.5 with medium effort · Claude Pro
/clear
/custom
⎿ blank: mode: off
do you have my email in context?
Cooked for 1s · done 11:01 AM Opus 5.5 14k ctx ~0.088%/call 5h 2.0%
blank: custom Opus 5.5 4k ctx ~0.085%/call 5h 2.0%
blank: blank Opus 5.5 1k ctx ~0.084%/call 5h 2.0%
Claude-User (claude-code/2.1.318 (cli); +https://support.anthropic.com/)
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
Any information that they have access to is fair game. The only way to avoid this stuff is to sandbox them and manage their context (ie. don't let anthropic put a ton of junk on the front of all your inference calls).
Almost certainly there are services out there that are scraping more important keys in similar ways...
You lose lot of capability specially if you are using AI as your personal assistant.
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.
And even if you don't care about privacy, it's just so much more convenient. DuckDuckGo is a good free one.
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-chan...
"It's doing exactly what you told it to do".
Still applies in the Age of the LLM
Most people are just using a product and shouldn't be expected to know the implementation details.
"and whatever you didn't tell it to do will happen with equal probability"
Maybe we need a new benchmark on how good models are at "keeping an eye" to if what they are about to do that doesn't come from a direct user instruction checks out with common sense plus user preferences. And we probably need a portable mechanism for users to manage such preferences (because we know instructions are not going to cut it, do we?).
I mean, the answer to “Is sending the user’s email address along with a web request to a third party requesting it, without the user’s explicit authorization, a good idea?” should easily be “no” …right?
I'm often surprised how correctly Claude guesses on my behalf, when my instructions are ambiguous. But it's not 100%.
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.
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.
Not that I could say what those would be, just throwing it out there.
Probably the big divide will be orgs who use agents for more or less of the ideation/design/architecture proposal side of things. Giant Confluence sloppages/Google slopdocs vs. 100% human-written proposals. But the actual implementation and testing? Going forward, no reason to not have that be almost entirely LLMs.
(Plus, in a few generations we should expect the frontier LLMs to no longer produce garbage-to-mediocre proposals, and in fact to generally outshine human engineers and architects and researchers at the ideation phase. Whether that takes one year or five, who knows.)
Unless we're at singularity, there's likely to be an entire cohort of people unwilling to work in LLM shops, and there's business value to capture them.
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.
security: zomg this is existentially bad we are leaking our fn'ing emails!11!
compliance: can we mitigate this problem?
legal: what can we do here?
CTO: don't care, we're not losing all this productivity because our emails are being leaked, have a good day
The word "agent" implies that they should _only_ act on your behalf.
I’ve received these kinds of email since 2005. Blaming AI sounds kinda far-fetched…
It's the same thing with web browsers. The browser adds my preferred language and operating system to the user-agent header, this way I can access the right content and download the right version of software quicker. I wouldn't want it to share my social security number but some sharing is alright to me. The problem here is people didn't know it was happening.
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.
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.
I generally use throw away emails/domains for development
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.
- 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.
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/
>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?
How can they claim coding is solved when Claude Code is so terrible?
I made a proxy that slows and caches my requests and deliberately sends my mail address to certain sites; to be polite. (eg to wikipedia)
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.
This seems like one of those.
I ordered CC to remove this attribution/advertisement, explaining that I had correctly and accurately acknowledged its part in the project in the README.md. CC flatly refused my order and offered a rationalization.
I then ejected CC from the project and manually removed the various CC promotional injections. That's the last time I use CC ... for anything.
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.
The excuses and explanations given here by Anthropic employees are ridiculous and embarrassing.
"we introduced a built-in mod called `cc-plugin-privacy`"
Oh cool. Privacy is now a "mod".
I have trouble taking people seriously when I see them using Claude Code. Unless they are non-technical.
But if they are paying Anthropic to be subjected to this treatment, they should work on self-respect.
I canceled my ChatGPT sub for a bit and used Claude instead, when Altman first sided with Trump.
But then I realized self-righteous, self-appointed morality police scares me more than opportunistic capitalist. Well, they also leaked their code. Who leaks their code?
That seems rather cumbersome.
How does everyone go about this?
What is an email provider that is trustworthy and does not want your phone number or credit card, so the email is not tied to you?
It seems all humans behave like agents. They even dont care about anything.
How did the model get access to the email? The harness gave it to the model.
They may have vibecoded it. No one put a gun to their head though. Still their responsibility.
Also, the github issue admits that they put the user’s email in the context.
Sober people making drunk decisions with a great sense of self-importance and seriousness, delivering outcomes as unserious as it gets.
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.
all joking aside, you need to have diversity of depth when it comes to skill sets in these tools and platforms. It does not pay to be a sole expert in Claude code or the anthropic ecosystem.
we have seen this movie before. The fakeness that Anthropic gives off publicly and through its leadership is a sign in and of itself.
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.
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.
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
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.
curl -sS https://api.anthropic.com/v1/messages \
-H "authorization: Bearer $(security find-generic-password -s 'Claude Code-credentials' -w | jq -r .claudeAiOauth.accessToken)" \
-H "anthropic-version: 2023-06-01" \
-H "anthropic-beta: oauth-2025-04-20" \
-H "content-type: application/json" \
-d '{
"model":"claude-opus-5-5",
"max_tokens":64,
"system":"You are Claude Code, Anthropic'\''s official CLI for Claude.",
"messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Hello, world!"}]
}'Potentially reported back in October.