Researchers built an AI that doxes any "anonymous" reddit account in under a minutes for $2.
eth zurich and anthropic published a terrifying paper proving that "practical anonymity" on the internet is officially dead.
they built a fully autonomous ai pipeline that takes your pseudonymous posts, extracts your identity signals, searches the web, and figures out exactly who you are. no human investigator needed.
the numbers are actually mindblowing..
- 67% of hacker news users identified correctly
- when the system makes a guess, it is right 90% of the time
- it even unmasked scientists whose interview transcripts were explicitly redacted for privacy
the scariest part? even time doesn't protect you.. they tested users who took a full year break and changed their interests. the ai still matched their old and new profiles with 90% precision. it sees through your persona changes like they aren't even there.
there is no defense against this. the agent splits the work into tiny, benign tasks like "summarizing a profile" or "ranking candidates." no api safety guardrail is going to flag it because no single step looks malicious..
every throwaway account. every "nobody will connect this to me" comment. it’s all just searchable micro-data now.
Community note
Paper shows LLM agents re-ID 67% of tested HN users (LinkedIn-linked then stripped) at 90% precision for $1-4 in minutes. Authors note these easier than typical pseudonymous accounts; lower for careful/Reddit users. Not "any" account.
arxiv.org/abs/2602.16800decrypt.co/379228/ai-can-…
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