alt Hacker NewsIt 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.
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FWIW I use an email alias service, so I would be able to tell if anthropic was the source of any of my email spam.
It is not.
Again, it should ask which email to send if required, or claude should be able to request which email to send when it needs to - it does neither.
This is an awfully leaky issue.
But if I wanted to collect data I could just change my website’s download policy and require full name and email?
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.