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

That's pretty obvious to anyone who had to maintain a high traffic site. Just the tip of the iceberg (I haven't included additional legal issues and other):

1.1 Strong protection against account takeover

Email change is one of the most abused recovery vectors in account takeover (ATO).

Eliminating email changes removes:

Social-engineering attacks on support

SIM-swap → email-change chains

Phished session → email swap → lockout of real user

Attacker must compromise the original inbox permanently, which is much harder.

1.2 No “high-risk” flows

Email change flows are among the highest-risk product flows:

Dual confirmation emails

Cooldown periods

Rollback windows

Manual reviews

Fixed email removes an entire class of security-critical code paths.

1.3 Fewer recovery attack surfaces No need for:

“I lost access to my email” flows

Identity verification uploads

Support-driven ownership disputes

Every recovery mechanism is an attack surface; removing them reduces risk.

You're very wrong, because account takeover can still happen due to a compromised email account. People can and do permanently lose access to their email account to a third party.

This is a logical fallacy. That's like saying security of the website is not important because someone can still steal your laptop.

Having worked in security on a fairly high profile, highly visible, largely used product — one of the fundamental decisions that paid off very well was intentionally including mechanisms to prevent issues with other businesses (like Google) from impacting user abilities for us.

Not having email change functionality would have been a huge usability, security, and customer service nightmare for us.

Regardless of anything else, not enabling users to change their email address effectively binds them to business with a single organization. It also ignores the fact that people can and do change emails for entirely opaque reasons from the banal to the authentically emergent.

ATO attacks are a fig leaf for such concerns, because you, as an organization, always have the power to revert a change to contact information. You just need to establish a process. It takes some consideration and table topping, but it’s not rocket science for a competent team.