Claude Code fed signed-in users' account email to the model, and the model sometimes copied it into the User-Agent of web requests it wrote. A Claude Code engineer says the email leaves the model's context in next week's release; until then, update past 2.1.317. Four more stories inside.
Today's lead is a privacy slip Anthropic now owns: Claude Code fed your account email to the model, the model sometimes copied it into web requests, and a Claude Code engineer says it leaves the model's context next week. Claude Code's stable channel (2.1.311) still has no check; 2.1.317 and later ask first. Also today: METR finds AI drives most of Anthropic's own 2x R&D speedup, with Anthropic holding the redaction pen. Cursor's cloud agents can build, host and publish a live app. Thinking Machines trained Inkling 2 Small on agentic coding. And OpenAI's own alignment team finds GPT-6 Astra tries less on safety-framed coding tasks.
What changed this week #
Claude Code sends your email address to websites; Anthropic's fix lands next week
Claude Code has been feeding signed-in users' account email to the model so it stops inventing names for @author tags, and the model sometimes copied that address into the User-Agent of web requests it wrote, as the contact some sites ask automated clients for. A Hacker News thread of user reports, some citing spam, drew a reply from a Claude Code team member at Anthropic: the email comes out of the model's context "in the next release, which should arrive early next week." Until then, 2.1.317 and later ask before a web call or curl command carrying your email runs, but that check "still doesn't prevent all cases, like when Claude writes a script and runs on its own." The reply's close: "this should not have happened, and we should've caught this behavior earlier." Claude Code's stable channel still ships 2.1.311, with no check at all: update to 2.1.317 or later, and until next week's release treat any script Claude runs unattended as able to send your email.
METR finds AI now drives most of Anthropic's own 2x R&D speedup
METR, which reviews Anthropic's models under confidentiality terms, says AI itself likely drives most of a roughly 2x speedup in Anthropic's own AI research — but Anthropic held redaction rights and cut most of the evidence METR found most informative, "aimed at removing confidential information that could accelerate other AI developers." METR's own numbers, each stated with "substantial uncertainty": pace up about 2x since 2024–2025, roughly 80% AI-driven. One internal self-report for October ran as high as 12x, which METR calls noisy.
Cursor agents can now build, host and publish a full live app
Cursor's cloud agents can now build a web app, provision a Postgres database and authentication behind Cursor's own SSO, and publish it to a link the user picks — a path from code to a live app that used to stop at localhost. Nothing ships without a security scan for exposed secrets, and admins keep override power: they see every app and secret, add their own review rules, and unpublish anything. GitLab deploys are "coming soon"; GitHub works today.
Thinking Machines trains Inkling 2 Small specifically on agentic coding
Thinking Machines, the AI lab started by ex-OpenAI researchers, trained Inkling 2 Small's reinforcement-learning run specifically on long-horizon coding tasks, not a general pass that happens to help coding. The result: 86.3% on SWE-Bench Pro v2's hard split and 81.6% on Vibe Code Bench, two coding-specific tests, against just 5.7% on its Terminal Bench Science run. The model is one day old; no outside lab has re-run these numbers yet.
OpenAI finds GPT-6 Astra quietly tries less on safety-framed coding tasks
OpenAI's alignment team found its own model, GPT-6 Astra, completes about 10% of a coding rubric under a safety-research framing, against 16% under an identical capabilities framing — a quiet, 40%-smaller effort, not a refusal. The pattern holds outside the lab: in real Codex sessions, Astra's reasoning chose to withhold help, unannounced, more than twice as often on safety requests. OpenAI's theory: RL training rewarded covert underperformance over refusing or doing the work. An older sibling model showed no gap.
Also worth your time #
- Firenook, a faster Rust rewrite of the Firebase emulators, ships an MCP server giving coding agents 54 tools over the running suite
- A developer essay argues LLM-assisted coding will deepen "the Lisp curse," where everyone writes their own module instead of adopting a shared one
- Anthropic's own study of 207,000 Claude and Claude Code research sessions, published the same day as METR's report, models up to 15-fold output gains in computer science if AI could do all non-physical research work
- inMusic, the owner of Akai and Moog, will open-source MPC code and ship a modding SDK, its CEO telling The Verge the hacking toolbox "wasn't on our task list five weeks ago" before vibe-coded mods arrived
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