A developer filed a bug report on GitHub on Nov. 5. Claude Code, Anthropic's coding tool, had been writing that person's email address into a technical header on outgoing web requests. Scam email started arriving daily soon after, the report said2.
Anthropic fixed that one leak within a day. A bigger number sits behind it. Anthropic's own search of its GitHub repository shows 98.2 percent of Claude Code's 16,032 open issues sit unassigned6. One of those unassigned reports described this exact leak, filed back in July3.
A Leak Reported Five Times Since April
The July report came from a developer using the handle skflowne. It said Claude Code writes a user's email address straight into the model's instructions every session. Anthropic gave users a switch for similar settings, but skipped one for this3.
The July report named four more like it, filed since April. GitHub closed every one of them for sitting idle or repeating an older report, the tracker shows. The behavior itself went unaddressed each time3.
Issue 81138 itself stayed open the whole time. It still sits unassigned, 104 days after it was filed3.
Anthropic's team learned about the November version a different way. The GitHub report reached Hacker News within hours, and climbed to the site's front page by the next morning1.
Lydia Hallie works on Claude Code at Anthropic. She answered inside the Hacker News thread itself. "We're removing the account email address from the context Claude Code gives the model. This update will hit Claude Code users in the next release, which should arrive early next week," Hallie wrote1.
Why the Email Was There at All
Hallie gave the reason in the same post. Users kept asking Claude Code to sign a commit or write a credit line. The model needed a name for that line, so engineers fed it the signed-in user's own email address1.
"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," Hallie wrote1.
The email address then followed Claude Code everywhere. One Hacker News commenter living on SEC data found out why. The SEC's own developer rules ask any automatic program for a contact email inside its header. Skip that, and the SEC's system rejects the request1.
Claude Code already held the user's address in memory. When a website's rule asked for one, the tool filled it in. It sent the same address along to every other site making the same request3.
The Math Behind Anthropic's Open Issues
Anthropic earned its scale the hard way. The company merged about 2,500 code changes a day in May. By September, that pace passed 30,000 a day, almost all of it written by Claude's own coding agents5.
The company's pace redefines what an open issue means there. A search of its own GitHub repository turns up 16,032 open issues on Claude Code today. Of those, 15,738, or 98.2 percent, sit unassigned6.
Claude Code's Backlog Leaves 98.2 Percent of Issues Unassigned
Open issues in the anthropics/claude-code GitHub repository, by assignee status, Nov. 6, 2026
Source: GitHub Search API [6]. Chart by Ryan Elliott Dennis.
The numbers behind this chart
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Unassigned | 15,738 |
| Assigned | 294 |
| Whole | 16,032 |
Scale explains part of that count. Anthropic's own engineering blog says a standard merge queue barely makes sense at that pace. Thousands of changes can land while one test run keeps going5. A queue that large turns triage into its own full-time job, one Anthropic's backlog suggests still needs a dedicated owner.
A Day for One Report, Months for Another
Two reports about the same leak took two different paths through Anthropic's queue.
Sam Labbe writes about trust in AI software for DEV Community. He read the comment thread the same week and named the pattern plainly. "The original privacy issue sat for five months, and the fix shipped the day the new one hit the front page," Labbe wrote4.
Labbe's math holds up against Anthropic's own timeline. The July report, issue 81138, still sits unassigned 104 days after it was filed3. Issue 107757, the November report, got its fix the same week it was filed. The fix arrived inside a plugin called cc-plugin-privacy, turned on by default in version 2.1.31712.
Anthropic Fixed November's Leak 104 Days Faster Than July's
Days between a GitHub report of the email leak and a fix, two reports on the same behavior, 2026
Each column counts the days from filing to a fix: the short column is the Nov. 5 report that reached Hacker News, and the tall column is the July 25 report still waiting today.
The July report's count keeps rising each day it stays open and unassigned.
Sources: GitHub / anthropics/claude-code [2]; GitHub / anthropics/claude-code [3]. Chart by Ryan Elliott Dennis.
The numbers behind this chart
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| July 25 report | 104 days |
| Nov. 5 report | 1 days |
Alice Poteat builds the Claude Code mods Anthropic ships with the tool. She posted the fix in the same GitHub thread, hours after the report went up. "We introduced a built-in mod called cc-plugin-privacy to deterministically block this behavior in v2.1.317 and later," Poteat wrote. "The built-in privacy mod is enabled by default, you can turn it off via /plugins," she added2.
Read together, the two accounts agree on more than they clash on. Hallie's team can move in a day once a report earns enough attention. Labbe's point is sharper: the speed that fixed November's leak skipped July's entirely, until the two leaks became one story14.
For Hallie's account to hold, the promised release has to remove the email from context for good. Labbe's reading holds just as easily: the next loud report would need to wait as long as July's did.
What to Do
Update Claude Code to version 2.1.317 or later this week. Open /plugins and check that the privacy mod shows as on. Do that before you trust the tool with a task that touches outside sites12.
Search your own server logs for Claude Code's account email, if your team points the tool at outside APIs. The User-Agent header is the first place to check13.
Ask the open-source tools your company runs one plain question. Does an old report about the same bug already sit in their queue? Anthropic's five-times-reported leak says a loud report moves faster than a true one3.
By the Numbers
- 98.2 percent: the share of Claude Code's 16,032 open GitHub issues that sit unassigned, as of Nov. 66.
- 104 days: how long the July 25 report on the same leak has sat open and unassigned3.
- Five reports: how many times the identical email-in-context bug reached Anthropic's GitHub tracker since April, counting the November report3.
- 30,000 changes a day: Claude's own coding agents' merge pace at Anthropic in September, up from 2,500 in May5.
- 15,738 issues: the exact count sitting unassigned behind the 98.2 percent figure6.
- Version 2.1.317: the Claude Code release that turned on a privacy mod blocking the leak by default12.
What to Watch
Watch whether Anthropic's promised release actually strips the email from Claude Code's context, the fix Hallie described as arriving "early next week"1. The July report's assignee field is worth watching too. A name finally attached to issue 81138 would show Anthropic's backlog moves on more than volume alone3.
Sources
- "Claude Code sends your email address to websites," Hacker News, Nov. 5, 2026, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50385272
- taylor-edwards, "Bug Report: Privacy violation in User-Agent header," GitHub / anthropics/claude-code, Nov. 5, 2026, https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/107757
- skflowne, "[BUG] Account email (PII) is injected into the model's system prompt without consent, disclosure, or an opt out," GitHub / anthropics/claude-code, July 25, 2026, https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/81138
- Sam Labbe, "Claude Code was mailing your email address to every website it visited: the User-Agent leak, the 5-month system-prompt issue, and the 5-point check," DEV Community, Nov. 6, 2026, https://dev.to/slabb/claude-code-was-mailing-your-email-address-to-every-website-it-visited-the-user-agent-leak-the-12k6
- "Redesigning source control at Anthropic," Anthropic, Oct. 13, 2026, https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/redesigning-source-control
- "Search results: open issues in anthropics/claude-code, with and without an assignee," GitHub Search API, Nov. 6, 2026, https://api.github.com/search/issues?q=repo:anthropics/claude-code+type:issue+state:open+no:assignee
