alt Hacker NewsClaude Code sends your email address to websites
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Thunk: "Privacy? What's that?!"
Good god, what a nothing burger, leave claude on auto mode ask it to make calls to sites that require email and pikachu face when claude sends your email to those sites. How is this the top post? Everyone acting like all web fetches auto attach a user email or something
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.
Tomorrow: "closed as this is intended"
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.
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.
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.
TBF if one cared about privacy or security one would not use Claude in first place.
Anthropic is evil and it didn't even start...
After all these ridiculous blunders with this closed source harness this incident should tell you why you should never use Claude Code.
This, along with all the other sabotages, is why I run a local abliterated Qwen.
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.
Thank you Misanthropic for reminding the world you cannot be trusted to organise a piss up in a brewery.
Another piece of evidence that Claude Code is a scam project. It is being subsidized by venture capital funding.
Related recently:
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
Repeat after me: the harness and the sandbox are separate tools.
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.
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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!"}]
}'15 minutes ago, no proof, no code, no nothing except a random claim, main on hackernews. wtf?
It’s embarrassing to be in tech right now.
Sober people making drunk decisions with a great sense of self-importance and seriousness, delivering outcomes as unserious as it gets.