What was reported
On November 5, 2026 GitHub user taylor-edwards opened issue 107757 in anthropics/claude-code, titled "Bug Report: Privacy violation in User-Agent header", with labels including bug and area:security. The report names platform darwin, terminal tmux and Claude Code version 2.1.318.
The author writes that "claude code divulged my email to arbitrary 3rd parties in the User-Agent request header while conducting web searches without my permission," and argues the address "needs to be removed from the harness entirely," not left as an opt-in or opt-out setting. Other users in the thread say they saw similar behaviour; those comments are not independently verified here.
What a Claude Code engineer said
In a Hacker News comment quoted in the issue, lydia_hallie wrote: "I work on Claude Code. 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." The comment says the email was added so Claude would stop inventing names for tags such as @author, but that when Claude wrote commands such as curl it sometimes put the address in the User-Agent as a contact.
The same comment says versions 2.1.317 and later ship a built-in mod, on by default, that asks before Claude runs a web tool call or curl-style command containing the email, that this still does not cover every case, such as when Claude writes and runs a script, and that the stable channel was still on 2.1.311. As of this writing Anthropic has not posted a separate company statement that we found.
What it means for you
If you use Claude Code for web fetches, update to 2.1.317 or later, watch for the confirmation prompt when a request would include your email, and prefer the upcoming release that removes the address from context. This article records a GitHub report and a named engineer's reply; it does not establish how many users were affected or which sites received the header.
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