It's not like they're going to say "we didn't tell Claude not to do it and we can't possibly review everything it does"

This is what one expects from vibe coding.

[delayed]

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

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.

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.

[delayed]

There are ways to sandbox this, and it should have been the first thing Claude Engineers were focussed on, it's a basic first requirement that the app doesn't have access to files outside a very limited set it requires to perform the task at hand.

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.)

[delayed]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why not?

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

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

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

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

Hope that clarifies.

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

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

GitHub offers noreply email addresses

You can absolutely remove the user's email from the context.

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

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 haha

> 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glad you can find the humor in the situation.

>haha

This is an official Anthropic response???

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

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

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

I am a security person, I don’t let the LLM see anything that I wouldn’t mind printed on the front page of the New York Times.

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

Masked email or separate email is the way.

That won't save you in this case because that email address still identifies you. It's an anti-spam measure, not a privacy measure.

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

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

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

Because Claude decided so. You think humans write or even review what they ship to run on your computer?