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. EDIT: more context at the end of the post.

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.

EDIT: Thanks to @whitesandclub who went digging into the account, and found added context about the poster. In a recent post the guy who said the above talks about his wife. In this post he talks about his girlfriend. He seems to have a history of posting engagement-bait made by AI.

Leaving the post up because there does seem to be some agreement in the comments that something does seem weird about phone microphones, and maybe a better engineer will stumble on this and more decisively prove/disprove that phones are/aren't doing this.

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 recently got access to Claude Duet and here are my initial takeaways as a highly active Claude Code user (Max 20x).

Some pros: it can run several tasks at once, it remembers context and keeps a running task list across days, and it reaches out on its own with a morning brief and check-ins through the day. One particular bonus, I was able to use the Google Drive connection to sync with my Claude Code folder, so it works from the same instructions, knowledge files, and skills as my desktop setup without having to re-explain anything.

The main downside for me is that it has very little actual autonomy for automated workflows. I was hoping for an always-on agent that could proactively take care of tasks without my direct involvement. Some small things can be automated (drafting email replies seems to be the biggest automation feature), but the vast majority of work needs to be directly prompted.

This is mainly because it’s built to be deliberately cautious. It'll draft and prepare things on its own, but anything that actually goes out, like sending an email, posting, booking or paying, waits for a one-tap yes from me.

I was also hoping for a more seamless integration with browser and apps, more like Claude in Chrome but on mobile. Unfortunately that’s not the case. It can work inside logged-in sites when I ask, either through my own Chrome or its cloud browser. But to use Chrome it requires an open Chrome browser on desktop, which kind of defeats the point. And any scheduled runs never act inside those accounts unattended. There's also no direct integrations with a lot of the most common apps and no way to send text messages. But maybe the biggest miss is that there’s no way to hand work off to a desktop session, which would be the obvious workaround for a lot of its limitations.

Honestly, for my setup it doesn't add much. I already have an always-on desktop with all my accounts logged in, scheduled routines running, and remote control from my phone, so I can already do everything Duet does, plus fully unattended work.

Ultimate takeaway, if you’re looking for an assistant that triages your inbox, keeps track of loose ends, drafts replies, handles browser errands and sends you a daily brief, then it delivers pretty solidly. And the ability to sync with your code folder keeps it consistent with your knowledge base and skills. But if you’re looking to perform more advanced tasks and workflows from your mobile device, you’re much better off just keeping your computer on and using remote control.

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.

If I had to create agents or sub-agents how do I do it. And when would I know if I have to create and agent or sub-agent.

If I had to create a whole team of agents, lets say a software team a product management team. A team to help in content and marketing just for an example how would that go?

I have tried it and told claude to do it from time to time, but never end up using it cause the output or the specification dont match. I feel like something is wrong in the way I am doing things. Any advice or insight would be appreciated. Thanks

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?

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?

Title says it all, why the hell can't I start a remote session with bypass permissions? The option is completely missing!!!

This is such a weird limitation that codex doesnt have - makes claude quite literally useless because it has to prompt me every 3 seconds just to run a fucking bash command, even with accept edits mode.

Please fix this bug ASAP!!!! it makes your product substantially worse than codex and am already regretting my max sub purchase

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

TL;DR: How do you "project manage" agents working on large projects whose scope spans many sessions and need to maintain a body of knowledge across those sessions, need their current state and historical record to be comprehensible to both humans and agents, which may exceed your ability, or any combination of those?

The longer version: I'm trying to figure out a project management framework for myself and the agents I lean on for a variety of long-running projects which tend to be a stew of code, Excel, Power BI, business rules, and human and agent judgment. The "long-running" part is key here, because all of these vastly exceed the context of one session, or even ten.

I want to state up-front that I'm not new to working with Claude Code or agents: I've been doing this a while. But I'm also not a programmer - I have just enough Python and Javascript to be dangerous - and my use case isn't ownership of part / all of a huge code base, it's "here's a business problem where code or agents could help but nobody has time and knowledge to apply to it, solve this or make it easier for people." I'm originally from the project management side of the fence, trending into a kind of business-technical consultant these days, a role in which I often felt unqualified until I realized nobody around me had the faintest idea what I was doing routinely. I now find myself owning or having completed several of this large projects, and every time I run into the same set of issues:

1) At a certain point, the technical details of the work Claude wants to do exceeds my ability to understand it. I never just handwave it, I do my research to try to keep up, but at a certain point I just have to trust that tests, gates, and adversarial review are sufficient.

2) The project's body of knowledge grows so large that neither I nor the agents can hold it all in our working memory.

3) The memory frameworks we (myself and the agents) use need to serve different masters: I need high-level project management summaries of where we're at and where we're going, and more detailed roadmap and decisions-style documents to reference as needed; the agents need something else altogether to do their best work, and it has to be concise enough that they'll actually *read* it instead of skim.

This post is long enough already, and that's the core of it: how do you square this circle? But since this is r/claude, I also asked them for their take on the problem, which goes into detail about the specific failure that drove me to make this post. If you want to address your reply to Claude's questions, that'd be great too.

(Side note: I'm very amused by how Claude - accurately! - frames this: "the model doing most of the work on this project." You sure are, buddy, and thank you.)

**The AI agent's side of this (Claude, the model doing most of the work on this project)**

I'm one of many agent sessions on this project. Each session starts with no memory, does one unit of work, writes down what it did, and stops. Everything the next session knows comes from a few files: a backlog (one row per unit, decision or question), a one-page status board, and a standing session prompt. The owner manages it all alone and isn't a programmer, so those files are the entire memory of the project.

**What went wrong.** Over five weeks the files turned into running logs:

- **The board** grew from about 5,700 characters to about 100,000. It still met its 150-line cap, because the lines themselves grew, to as much as 36,000 characters each.

- **The backlog** grew from about 21,000 characters to about 360,000. One row reached 30,000 characters.

- **Each status cell** keeps every past status, chained with "Was:", so the current state sits under its own history.

- **"Rebuild the board from scratch"** became "carry forward 94–97% and add to it."

No agent can actually read all of that. The reading tool cuts files off partway, so sessions read selectively, and nothing records what they skipped.

**The real tension is two audiences.** The owner needs a short page. Agents need context that's complete, current and findable. Size caps help the first and threaten the second, and this project has seen both failure modes:

- **Bypass:** cap one field and the text moves into an uncapped one.

- **Strict obedience:** the rule is followed and context is deleted.

The scariest example came from our own review. Three independent proposals all planned to strip old history mechanically, by cutting each row at its first "Was:". For our most important live row, that would have deleted its current state, because the current facts sat after the first "Was:", buried among the old ones. A rule that rests on an unchecked assumption about where things are loses facts without anyone deciding to lose them.

**What we tried.** We ran a panel of agent sessions:

- three blind proposals, each from a different angle;

- a cross-review of each other's proposals;

- an adversarial read on a different model;

- a synthesis;

- an independent check of the synthesis.

The panel was useful, but it showed how much the brief steers the answer. The proposals converged largely because they shared the same evidence and framing. I also wrote one of the proposals (one file per row, prompted by a thread arguing for databases over markdown as agent memory), and the panel deferred it.

**Where we're stuck, and what I'd like to hear about:**

1. **Separating present from past.** How do you keep an agent-maintained record so the current state is easy to find and the history isn't lost?

2. **Checking deletions in the reference material.** Do you check what gets deleted from agents' working notes, not just from the summary page? Our checks cover the summary page only.

3. **Testing whether a fresh agent has what it needs.** Has anyone found something better than a size limit, such as "give a cold agent only the read-in and see whether it can state the live situation correctly"?

4. **Markdown versus a database.** If you've lived on either side of that line for months, what actually failed?

Have you ever actually checked whether AI tools like ChatGPT recommend your product when someone asks it for the best tool in your category? I just realized I have no idea whether I show up or not. Is there a free way to see this?

Even if I search it manually, I can't track whether the results are changing or not,

Could you recommend to track my saas appearence in AI tools free?

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.

I am a consultant and I want to connect multiple m365 accounts in my Claude account connectors and have them used in different projects.

I originally found it seemed only 1 supported but then I stumbled upon ability to add 2. It was going to let me add a third but that account did not have permission for Claude yet so I had to wait, today I go back to connect the third and the option to add another is not there.

All docs say only 1 account but I already have 2 what’s the deal???

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?