Anthropic: You can't change your Claude account email address

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8452276-how-do-i-change-the-email-address-associated-with-my-account

by behnamoh • 7 months ago

89 65 7 months ago

support.claude.com

HPMOR• 7 months ago

Why is this the case? I don't understand, can somebody explain the logic to me here?

I can only assume there is some database structuring issue where things would potentially be broken if emails aren't update correctly, but I'm just guessing.

ares623• 7 months ago

Maybe used the email address as a primary key. Ask me how I know.

blitzegg2• 7 months ago

Well it does eliminate a whole list of problems related to account takeover, account recovery workflows, legal questions regarding which email owns the data, etc. Sometimes less is more. Secure, reliable, simple.

prmph4• 7 months ago

So with all their billions they could not get a proper software engineer to architect their project?

Unless there is some deep technical reason why things have to be this way, which I very much doubt.

And now they can't change it? Where is Claude when you need him/her

sixothree• 7 months ago

They also allow google accounts. I guess they use the email for that too?

Glyptodon2• 7 months ago

That was my first guess TBH. Mostly because it seems like the kind of thing scientists writing Python would do.

aunty_helen• 7 months ago

I know, what’s so special about email? The common thing between your accounts, that the company that has a lot of chat history is allowing you not to change?

perotid• 7 months ago

When creating an account, please make sure you use an email you'll have long-term access to.

I'm just guessing, but the above might suggest a potential incentive: They would like you to hand over a valuable/longterm email, as opposed to a temporary email (for supposedly more privacy or testing), by making it difficult to change it later.

'Dark patterns are the pavement of todays corporate infrastructure.'

doctorpangloss• 7 months ago

To reduce subscription sharing. It’s not complicated.

CPLX• 7 months ago

If I had to guess, it's to stop people from acquiring a high reputation with Anthropic and then selling the account or giving it to other people.

Obviously, there's a way to do that still. Not saying it's a good idea. But if I had to guess as to why, that's the one that comes to mind.

Glyptodon2• 7 months ago

Maybe they should read that article (that was on HN) from the other day and switch to using account numbers with no customer information since that'd be about the same difference anyway given this behavior.

FloorEgg• 7 months ago

It's the same with openai.

I had to switch emails so I had to create a new account.

Seems bonkers.

blitzar• 7 months ago

They should vibe code a fix

jsheard• 7 months ago

Clearly we need an EmailChange-Verified benchmark since this is such a difficult problem.

raverbashing• 7 months ago

Do they use Okta or some other 3rd party Auth solution?

BLKNSLVR• 7 months ago

Oh, the wonders provided to humanity by "AI"!

Can this be used as a dagger to the heart of all the arguments about the revolutionary nature of what we currently call AI?

What a mockery this is.

wg0• 7 months ago

The authentication account should have a permanent stable identifier that should be the provider's responsibility to issue and manage.

Everything else including email and username should be changeable (provided there's no conflict with other accounts)

Wowfunhappy• 7 months ago

(provided there's no conflict with other accounts)

Couldn't you use this to figure out which emails have registered with Claude?

bathtub365• 7 months ago

You can do this on almost every online service by trying to create an account with an email that already has an account.

encoderer3• 7 months ago

Guys remember this kind of stuff when you are building side projects. You can just ship you don’t need every feature on day one.

behnamoh• 7 months ago

the ability to change email address is not that complicated of a feature to postpone to later.

maybe they should ask CC to fix this...

encoderer3• 7 months ago

It’s not a complicated feature and it’s also not required on day 1. At Cronitor we did not have it for nearly 2 years.

rarisma• 7 months ago

future of humanity btw.

keeda2• 7 months ago

Anecdote, but I've never been able to use Claude (directly) because their defense systems seem overly sensitive to your email address. I signed up for Claude using a relatively new Outlook email address that I set up for an independent purpose. My account got instabanned. Like, I couldn't proceed at all. I don't even know what the Claude UI looks like. All I could do was appeal using a Google Form.

I appealed and got a standard Google Forms response. There was no follow-up after that. It never got fixed and I never tried again... plenty of free, more accessible fish out there, and various agents like Copilot give me access to Sonnet anyway.

But now I wonder, what is it about the account that triggered this block. If it was because of the reputation of the account, how did Anthropic even know that this account was created a few weeks ago?

isubkhankulov• 7 months ago

There are vendors like Emailage that somehow determine the age of email addresses. Very useful because fraudsters tend to buy credit cards and bank accounts, then need to complete the identity by registering an email address for that identity.

Historically, outlook emails have been very easy for this compared to gmail addresses, which require phone numbers, etc.

eswat• 7 months ago

One of the reasons "aged" account marketplaces got more popular. People buy from vendors that farm a ton of these accounts and wait to sell them, or those reselling compromised accounts (especially with EDU accounts before institutions actually implemented security controls).

tbcj• 7 months ago

Same here - though I used my personal email domain with claude as the local/username. They autobanned that one and then banned my actual personal email. The only one that worked was a Google login. My appeal had a boilerplate response.

JLO64• 7 months ago

How new was your email address? When I set up my work Claude account with my near fresh email (I had just set up Outlook to work with my domain) I had no issues.

keeda2• 7 months ago

IIRC it was about 3 weeks old. I hadn't used it for anything else in that time either, which probably also contributd to the lack of reputation.

nozzlegear• 7 months ago

Another anecdote, but I signed up for Claude using a brand spanking new iCloud private relay address that was created specifically for Claude and it let me in without any problems. We're talking 10 seconds or less from address creation to account creation.

jfaat• 7 months ago

It's worth checking the spam score if its a new domain and see if there's anything on the internet archive. I learned this the hard way and now I check before buying

chistev• 7 months ago

I have never been able to use it because they require a phone number during registration and would always reject mine.

sawjet• 7 months ago

I don't think this is a requirement anymore

SeanAnderson2• 7 months ago

You can't change ChatGPT email address, either, fwiw.

The email I signed up for got compromised a couple of months ago and I ended up having to delete my entire GPT account, losing all my history, to recreate using a new email.

It was super annoying and, out of hundreds of websites I had to update, only OpenAI and Anthropic wouldn't let me change my email. A few of them required contacting support with some sort of proof, but at least doable.

cj• 7 months ago

Is there a way to export out of one account into another?

I made the mistake of using my company provided ChatGPT account for non-work stuff. It was fine before the memory features came out. But now I'm regretting not having a separate personal one.

Edit: For ChatGPT (not sure about Claude) https://help.openai.com/en/articles/9106926-transferring-con...

dizhn• 7 months ago

You can clear & turn off the memory stuff no?

SeanAnderson2• 7 months ago

You can export your data to an email address but there's no import/transfer functionality that I'm aware of

themafia• 7 months ago

They should dogfood their own product and ask Claude to fix it for them. :|

arjie• 7 months ago

It sort of makes sense. These guys were AI labs before they were ever web developers. They prompted me to switch to a business account, so I did but my business email is not my personal email and I promptly lost all the old chats. Well, all right then.

Perplexingly, this business account is as bad as a Google Workplace account. It has restrictions on it that I didn't have when I was on my own account. As an example, I can't share chats outside the organization. Fine, all right then.

pwmanager• 7 months ago

Same like openAI

xnx• 7 months ago

(wrong thread)

jsnell• 7 months ago

You're probably in the wrong thread. This is about changing email addresses for accounts. That's not a payment-gated feature on Google.

2780781306408• 7 months ago

The technology just isn't there yet.

Quarondeau• 7 months ago

I wonder how they'd handle this under the GDPR, which has an explicit "Right to rectification".

The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller without undue delay the rectification of inaccurate personal data concerning him or her.

Taking into account the purposes of the processing, the data subject shall have the right to have incomplete personal data completed, including by means of providing a supplementary statement.

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-16-gdpr/

Obviously if you change your email address, the old one ceases to be correct, even if it was correct before.

mhitza• 7 months ago

They don't. They haven't been fined yet to care.

bibimsz• 7 months ago

its ridiculous

searls• 7 months ago

OpenAI doesn't let you change your email address, either.

fillskills• 7 months ago

Been really stuck with the email I entered earlier with ChatGPT. Hope they change this policy soon

villgax• 7 months ago

Vibe code this…lol

daft_pink• 7 months ago

I wanted to switch so I could use single sign on with my google account because they use the magic link login but I couldn’t. So sad :(

hamdouni• 7 months ago

Maybe they can use an LLM to help them implement this feature ? Oh wait a second...

ikidd• 7 months ago

Probably had Claude write their authentication backend.

Primarykey:email_address

Anthropic: You can't change your Claude account email address

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