Anthropic: You can't change your Claude account email address
54 comments
·December 20, 2025keeda
isubkhankulov
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
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
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.
throw20251220
[flagged]
coeneedell
You made a throwaway account to say this?
throw20251220
Yes. Because it’s funny and I don’t have any other account.
quietbritishjim
Technically (or, at least, historically), they should have used the indefinite pronoun "one" i.e. "...because their defense systems seem overly sensitive to one's email address". But I imagine that would've got more comments than using you/your.
wg0
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
> (provided there's no conflict with other accounts)
Couldn't you use this to figure out which emails have registered with Claude?
daft_pink
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 :(
Glyptodon
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
It's the same with openai.
I had to switch emails so I had to create a new account.
Seems bonkers.
searls
OpenAI doesn't let you change your email address, either.
HPMOR
Why is this the case? I don't understand, can somebody explain the logic to me here?
ares623
Maybe used the email address as a primary key. Ask me how I know.
Glyptodon
That was my first guess TBH. Mostly because it seems like the kind of thing scientists writing Python would do.
prmph
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
jaggederest
The funny thing is that if you ask Claude if you should use email address as a primary key it will pretty adamantly warn you away from it:
> I'd recommend against using email as the primary key for a large LLM chat website. Here's why:
> Problems with email as primary key:
> 1. Emails change - Users often want to update their email addresses. With email as PK, you'd need to cascade updates across all related tables (chat sessions, messages, settings, etc.), which is expensive and error-prone
> [Edited for length]
blitzegg
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.
prmph
I fail to see how preventing email changes solves the issues you listed, or how allowing it necessarily makes them worse.
darth_avocado
If anything, this makes account takeover and account recovery way more difficult. It probably makes a bunch of legal stuff easier for them, but that’s about it.
sixothree
They also allow google accounts. I guess they use the email for that too?
perotid
>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.'
aunty_helen
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?
rbtprograms
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.
CPLX
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.
doctorpangloss
To reduce subscription sharing. It’s not complicated.
arjie
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.
themafia
They should dogfood their own product and ask Claude to fix it for them. :|
blitzar
They should vibe code a fix
jsheard
Clearly we need an EmailChange-Verified benchmark since this is such a difficult problem.
Quarondeau
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
They don't. They haven't been fined yet to care.
SeanAnderson
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
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...
SeanAnderson
You can export your data to an email address but there's no import/transfer functionality that I'm aware of
dizhn
You can clear & turn off the memory stuff no?
null
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?