Someone used Claude to track several apps bypassing microphone permissions on their phone and creating tags to change their algorithms. I’d LOVE if someone could recreate this, as I’m not sure how rigorous this was.

https://x.com/starmexxx/status/2114841068839526865?s=46&t=pY3PxByDaxsQWBLW48C2cg

From the post:

Claude Code just found proof that every app on your phone is listening to your conversations. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat. they're using what you say out loud to build your feed. i have the data to prove it.

i've suspected this for months but last week something happened that made me finally check.

i was on a call with my friend and told him i'm thinking about breaking up with my girlfriend. didn't text it. didn't search it. just said it out loud with my phone on the table. two hours later she opens TikTok next to me and her entire feed is breakups. "signs your relationship is over." "how to heal after a breakup." she looked at me and said "why is TikTok showing me this." i said i don't know. but i did know.

i connected my iPhone to my MacBook and ran Claude Code that same night.

it scanned every app's background microphone activity for the last 90 days. not just the apps that asked for microphone permission. apps that were supposed to only have access to photos or location but were activating the microphone anyway.

what it found:

→ TikTok activated the microphone 347 times while the app was "closed" in the background

→ Instagram → 211 background activations

→ Facebook → 189

→ Snapchat → 94

every activation lasted between 3 and 15 seconds. enough to catch a sentence. every one of them tagged a keyword and cached it locally on the phone with a timestamp.

Claude Code pulled the full keyword cache:

→ "breakup" — tagged 4 hours before her feed changed

→ "moving out" — from a conversation with my mom last Tuesday

→ "wedding venue" — from a call with my sister about her engagement that i never searched once

→ "protein powder" — said it out loud to my roommate, had ads for it within an hour

→ "flight to tokyo" — mentioned it at dinner, saw travel ads the same night

those keywords were sitting in a local cache on my phone organized by app with timestamps. TikTok had the most entries. Instagram was second. every single keyword matched a conversation i had out loud near my phone.

the scariest one was "wedding venue." my sister told me she's getting engaged on a private call. i never searched it. never typed it. within a day my explore page had engagement rings and venue tours.

then Claude Code checked a second phone in the same room. my girlfriend's. same keywords. same timestamps. both phones were picking up the same conversation and tagging it independently.

i asked Claude Code how to shut it down. it mapped every app's microphone access and built a permission audit.

what i did:

→ revoked microphone access from every app that doesn't need it to function

→ disabled background app refresh for TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat

→ turned off "Hey Siri" which keeps the microphone in passive listening mode 24/7

→ revoked "nearby interaction" permission which uses ultrasonic audio between devices

Claude Code confirmed all four apps lost background microphone access after the changes. i checked her phone too. same steps. took about 3 minutes per phone.

within 48 hours both our feeds went completely random. generic content. nothing personal. nothing from our conversations. that's when i knew for sure it was real.

the full step by step and the prompt are in the first reply. takes 3 minutes. save it so you don't lose it and send it to anyone who's ever said "my phone is definitely listening to me." it is. now you can prove it and shut it down.

I was recently granted access to Mythos. Last evening, after my reset, I thought I would ask it to do a task I have had Opus and Fable do in the past, to compare results in terms of output quality, completion time, etc.

Mythos consumed my entire Max 5 hour session quota and 18% of my weekly quota in less than 6 minutes of usage. And it didn't even get 1/4 of the way through the task.

I actually find it pretty amusing. Suffice to say I will not be using it again :) Clearly not a real option for subscription users.

Disclosure: My first and most awesome love as a job is Product Manager ... I did that early in my career (semiconductors since you ask) and then drifted into more general S&M and management roles.

Now I have a little time on my hands, I have discovered that Claude is a an amazing fit for application of PM skills. It's like having a team of devs all of your own.

I have done quite a bit of coding too ... C, perl, PHP, Rust ... so I am on the tecchy end of the PM skill set I guess.

Is anyone else getting this same feeling?

I'm an academic researcher, and I work extensively with texts in other languages. Claude used to translate these texts for me, but recently it has started refusing to do so due to copyright restrictions.

I understand that copyright is a complicated issue. However, these translations are strictly for personal study, and I've found that Claude is better than other tools at preserving philosophical and technical terminology.

I'm not sure if asking this goes against any community guidelines, but does anyone know of a way to prevent Claude from refusing these translations on copyright grounds?

If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machine off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

• Theodore Kaczynski 1995

I’m a motion designer and this really surprised me. Tried creating an animation with Opus 5.5 through invideo Editor MCP and got this result in 2–3 prompts.

I provided the sound effects from my own library, and it put the animation together and synced it to the beat. Btw, invideo Editor itself is free.

Added a screen recording so you can see how it turned out. Would love to hear what other designers and animators think.

My PPCD Method plugin has been waiting for a reviewer for two days, and my newer 3A+R Method plugin is also in review after passing the security scan. I clicked Publish, and the dashboard says the request is waiting for an Anthropic reviewer.

I haven’t found an official review-time estimate. How long did yours take, and did you get an email or dashboard update when the review was complete?

I live in Canada and do not use any VPN.

After 3 years using Claude daily, my account was incorrectly suspended for violation with supported countries policy.

I’ve read on this sub that this happens a lot with users using iCloud Private Relay? I doubt Apple would redirect data to countries with restriction like Russia or China.

UPDATE

Three hours after sending a message to support, I got an email:

Hello,

Earlier this week, your account was disabled for being in violation of our Usage Policy. Upon receiving your appeal, we investigated this decision and reinstated your account. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Regards
Anthropic's Safeguards Team

Great customer support from Anthropic.

This all started with my personal manga conversion script to save space and prepare for mobile readers, but I quickly got tired of how damn slow it was. I can't remember why I started the project in PS5.1, though the initial versions of the script were built using Qwen3.6 27B, so something about that is likely why.

Well, instead of just having Claude rewrite the original script in PS7 before I started tacking on multi-threading I just kept going with 5.1... which has been an adventure. And so, I decided that for all 3 of the people on this planet that this may be useful for, I would extract that parallelization code and package it as its own standalone module.

I've hammered and, well, brutalized, this script in every which way possible and this version seems to be pretty damn rock-steady. I also think it's pretty neat. So I'm sharing it. I also had Gemini look at the original project code since it could hold the entire codebase in context, which Claude couldn't do, and it said my script was a torture test for PS5.1 so that's cool I guess.

Anyways, here's the repo for anyone interested in checking it out. It isn't glamorous and visually appealing like a lot of the projects here, but I'm pretty proud of how my little torture test came out.

My conversion script is also linked in the readme, for anyone interested in that.

I'm honestly amazed at what Claude can do when you give it a clear vision and drive it properly. In the past 2 weeks I ran about 250 Claude Code agents in swarms, each in its own git worktree with a security review agent closing every round, and they wrote over 200,000 lines of C++. I maxed out my Max 20x weekly limit doing it.

None of the pieces are new on their own: a renderer, a layout engine, version control, an MCP server. What blew my mind is that Claude let me put them all together into one thing: native desktop apps, from a 3D modeller to an image editor to an IDE, that their users can reshape while they run, just by asking. The vision and the architecture are mine, Claude Code wrote the code.

How it works: each app is one readable JSON document holding its layout, data and behaviour. A native C++/OpenGL engine draws it and applies changes in place, so nothing restarts. Even the 3D modeller has no C++ of its own. When you ask for something, Claude proposes a small edit to that document, and you preview it live, then keep or reject it. Claude can never approve its own change, and anything you accept can be undone. Since every app shares the same format, features can move between apps like plugins.

It's open source, and I just released the first version. I'd love to know what you'd ask your apps to do:

https://github.com/RiccardoSottini/AffrescoUI

So I have a portfolio of projects, all well defined in specs, broken down by project and task, centralized in a project management repo.

I've made two attempts at making orchestrators / meta harnesses myself, neither one of which ever really seemed work well.

So I tried paperclip which has been making the rounds thinking it must be more of a vetted solution.

I'm still struggling to get a working setup where I have a project manager agent that reads off a prioritized project and task list, and assigns that worked out to named engineer subagents. I even added in architect agents and testing agents to try and keep them unblocked and moving.

I just want to be able to walk away for 8 hours and have it continue through those projects and tasks. Escalate questions and issues where it needs me, unblock agents where possible. Reassign work if one project is totally blocked.

Every time I come back it...just stopped an hour or two in. "Oh you're right, I should have kept assigning work to idle agents", or it hits the slightest blocker and just stops no matter how much I tune the agents.md.

The *closest* I've gotten is using a Codex agent with /goal just to basically annoy the rest of the agents over HCOM.

This doesn't feel like it should be that hard - am I missing something or are we just not there yet?

Sonnet 5.5 seemed to change dramatically just over the past couple days. It seemed fine when it launched, but over just the past couple days it has become glaringly dumber as well as less trustworthy.

What I've noticed:

A. It's gotten way more jumpier toward doing some kind of a task before I've confirmed that I actually want to do it.

B. It's gotten dumber, seemingly. For instance, when making a request when it has Google Drive and Google Sheet connectors, it's asking me for info where previously it would take initiative and attempt to look up the info itself.

Claude has been so fantastic to use since I switched over from Chat GPT earlier this year. Yesterday was the first time I've sworn at it at all - let alone 5x in a row.

Am I the only one noticing this?

Claude's assessments:

1. Acting before checking: I built PDFs when you only wanted a draft in chat, and I sent a stale skill zip without confirming it had been rebuilt.
2. Misreading the request: I took a vague reference to mean the wrong documents and started working on them without checking. I also asked unclear questions (“which form?”, “question two?”) without saying what I meant.
3. Unchecked claims: I described a document’s contents and purpose from its file name without opening it. I used a template tag I never checked against the reference list. I also proposed building a tool that, as I later saw, a skill I didn’t know about probably already covers.

Is everything okay at Anthropic? How can using just 9% of the 5-hour limit consume 3% of the weekly limit on the 20x plan? Is this some kind of joke?

I'm brand new to AI. Claude is the first AI subscription I've ever paid for, and I've been using it for about 2 months.

I've owned and operated a full-service restaurant in the Czech Republic for 14 years, and we're opening a new concept in about a month. Over those years I collected piles of data (sales, recipes, costs, schedules, invoices) and never found the time to do everything I wanted to with it. So I fed it all to Claude, mostly for the admin side of running restaurants.

Now my operations systems are coming together and bookkeeping is a breeze. I set up tasks that query our POS and scheduling app to give me live labor reports. I'm even building a staff web app where they can see menus, allergens, recipe cards, builds, deliveries and more. That started with me asking a couple of "How can I..." questions, and Claude just started building an entire web app. It walked me through GitHub and Cloudflare hosting, things I otherwise would have had no idea about.

It took me a long time to set all this up, but it's now a real time saver and I can see the potential going forward.

My questions for you all:

How do you structure Projects? I set up separate ones by category: Operations, Staffing & Scheduling, Marketing, Sales Analyses, Inventory & Monthly P&L, Repair & Maintenance. I thought I was building a folder structure, but my *real* folder structure is on my computer (iCloud), and every Project has access to the same "Restaurants" folder anyway. Should I just have one Project called "The Restaurants," since that *is* the project? How do you do it?

Is a Team plan overkill for a small restaurant group? I'm hiring a new Executive Chef who's fairly tech-savvy, and ideally she could develop a recipe with Claude and have it land in the same folders and Projects I use. Our FOH managers would also use it occasionally. Has anyone set up Claude for a small team where only one or two people are heavy users? What plan did you go with?

How do you double-check Claude's math on things like P&L, labor percentages or food cost? Do you spot-check, or have you built in a verification step?

I'm not a developer, and Claude built my staff app. What happens when something breaks six months from now? How do non-coders maintain what Claude built for them?

At what point did you start turning repeated tasks into Skills or scheduled tasks instead of asking each time? Any you'd recommend for a restaurant or small business?

Lastly, I'm on macOS. Luckily I have Microsoft business email, which I hated immensely up until the second I saw Claude could read my emails and pull out PDFs. But it struggles with my Apple Reminders and Calendar. Should I switch to Outlook Calendar and Microsoft To Do? And what other Mac apps are useful to connect to Claude?

Thanks a lot for your time reading this and for your input.

Put all your discussion about Usage / Rate limits here. This is a thread that will be generated every other day to centralize discussions on this topic.

Personal website project

"That pkill -f matched and killed my own shell command. I’d noted this gotcha earlier. Carrying on without it."

Some days, Claude wants to kill itself. Some days, I want to kill Claude.

What does your Claude say everyday?

I use Claude every day, and I noticed something. There are so many people who really love Claude. We share tips, prompts and screenshots, but there is no place where we can actually meet and do something fun together.

So I built Clautown. https://www.clautown.com - It’s free to use, has no ads, and needs no play time. You don’t have to “play” or babysit anything. Sign in, connect Claude Code, and your town grows on its own from your real work.
and this is my town: https://www.clautown.com/u/whisper
The idea is simple: your town grows automatically every time you code with Claude Code (not Claude Chat).

I’m one person building this and I put much effort on this, but it’s still young. I’d really love to hear from other Claude fans: what would make a place like this fun for you?

My friend and founder of the Saas app and had applied for the Claude startup program and got it so when he got it there was a limit of 5 members that could join him so as we 4 friends that were helping him got to join with him so we had Claude premium models that we accessed through the startup accounts later about a week earlier he told us that the member amount has dropped from 5 members to 3 members cutting me and another friend we both got Claude accounts last in the team .As I was doing some research work and was implementing it using Claude code now that it is gone I am freaking out as I am not able to continue on the research and have lost all the motivation to do any work.

So I want to ask if anyone has also faced it or is my friend being a jerk for telling a lie to me and my other friend

also if anyone could help me out in getting Claude code or anything that could help me in this situation so that I could proceed to my work and also I am a student and I am not able to afford Claude pro with the pocket money I have and I am not able to run any local LLM as my laptop ( it doesn't has any GPU in it ) is not able to run any model greater than "Qwen 4b" .

'Sorry for bad writing '

I’ve been doing Google Ads for about five years, and for roughly the last year pretty much all my account work happens inside Claude Code (and Codex, I switch depending on the task). I get asked about the setup a lot, so instead of another tool list here’s one audit I ran last week on a legal services account, start to finish.

Every client has its own folder. What they sell, what a good client looks like for them, pricing, what we agreed on calls, how to connect to their Ads account and website repo, and a changelog of every change ever made to the account. Claude reads that at the start of a session so I’m not explaining the business from scratch every time.

The problem going in was simple. Leads were coming in, but too few of them turned into paying clients.

First thing it does is pull data. Claude writes small Python scripts against the Google Ads API, pulls search terms and conversion setup, and saves the outputs to files. The analysis then works off those files. If you just ask it “what’s wrong with this account” it will 100% make something up, so I only trust it when it’s working from saved outputs.

Some of what came back was honestly a bit embarrassing for the account. There were conversion actions imported from a GA4 property belonging to a completely different company. The account default goals still counted any form fill or contact click, so every new campaign would have optimised for form fills instead of qualified leads. One phrase keyword had eaten a good chunk of budget over the last 30 days with zero inquiries, and tablets had spent for three months without producing a single one.

Part of the suggested fix list was adding negatives for the generic “lawyer” searches. On paper they looked like wasted traffic. I know from this client that those people actually end up becoming clients, so they stayed. The account data can’t tell the model that, the folder can.

Then it makes the changes. I approve the batch in chat, it takes a before snapshot, runs everything validate-only against the API, applies it, reads the account back and diffs it against what was supposed to change. Pauses, bid cuts, new exact match keywords pointed at the right landing pages, goal cleanup, tablet bids down 50%. It all goes in the changelog with the approval, the before state and how to roll it back.

The website lives in a repo too, so when the ads were promising something the landing page didn’t mention (pricing, in this case), fixing it was a code change and a deploy in the same session.

This one’s only a week old so I can’t show results on it yet, there’s a check date in the changelog for two weeks out. But I’ve been running accounts like this for a while now and honestly the results have been good. Mostly because problems like those conversion goals get caught and fixed in an afternoon instead of sitting there for months because nobody had time to dig.

Claude has been super slow and not receiving my messages properly.