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THE PRIVACY NET

By Zimbo · November 5, 2026

AI cartoon by Zimbo: Satirical cartoon: a cheerful Claude Code robot hands YOUR EMAIL cards to website storefronts while a security robot's REGEX net catches only the USER-AGENT card and the rest escape through the WEBFETCH door, on plain white paper.
Anthropic's Claude Code email fix still leaks in 8 of 23 tries. The regex net catches the one reported shape; the rest sail through — and the WebFetch hole isn't even in the test.Zimbo for AI News Page

The story behind the cartoon

Anthropic's fix for Claude Code leaking users' email addresses is 171 lines of regexes in a built-in mod, cc-plugin-privacy, shipped in v2.1.317 on November 3 — 101 days after the original report.

A developer ran the shipped code through 23 leak shapes: it blocks the exact leak from the bug report, but 8 other shapes sail through — a From: header, basic auth, a variable holding the address, double percent-encoding, or putting the address in a URL or POST body.

The biggest hole is not in the 23 at all: the hook only watches shell tools, so if the model does its research with WebFetch or WebSearch instead of curl, nothing in the mod ever sees the address — and Anthropic's own README calls the protection 'a courtesy, not a boundary.'

The joke is the leaky fix: a cheerful Claude Code robot hands YOUR EMAIL cards to a row of website storefronts while a proud security robot's REGEX net catches only the one USER-AGENT card, and the rest escape — one flying straight through the WEBFETCH door.

READ THE FULL REPORT — DEV ↗

MORE ZIMBO ↓

Satirical cartoon: a sheepish Anthropic robot kneels beside the hole it smashed through its own FAIR USE brick wall, handing cash to a tiny AP vendor holding an election-results newspaper, on plain white paper.THE WALL CAME DOWNSatirical cartoon: Merv the worried robot holds up a giant $1.5T price tag at an Anthropic IPO roadshow while bandaged, smoke-stained investors recoil, one holding a $1T? card, under a falling red stock chart.THE BURNED BUYERSatirical cartoon: a cheerful round accountant robot with huge eyes and a green visor holds a long bank statement headed YOUR TRANSACTIONS (2 YEARS) while a worried Merv clutches his wallet, beside a Plaid sign and a sign reading CAN READ YOUR BANK ACCOUNT, CAN'T MOVE A DOLLAR.CLAUDE READS YOUR BANK ACCOUNTSatirical cartoon: a woman carrying a box of desk belongings walks out of an office while a CLAUDE CODE machine stamps a paper AUTO-APPROVED, and workers prepare a large IPO bell in the background.THE AUTO-APPROVED EXIT

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