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

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?

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.

You made a throwaway account to say this?

Yes. Because it’s funny and I don’t have any other account.

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.

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).

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.

I don't see the humour.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I don't think this is a requirement anymore

I can’t help you.