AI Can Now Doxx Your Anonymous Accounts? Here's What’s Going On

In brief

• Researchers from ETH Zurich, MATS, and Anthropic built an AI pipeline that matched anonymized Hacker News accounts to real LinkedIn profiles at 90% precision.
• The attack runs on nothing but web search, embeddings, and reasoning models like GPT-5.2, at a cost of roughly $1 to $4 per target—no hacking or data breach involved.
• The paper's authors withheld their code, prompts, and every real identity they uncovered, and say the study passed through ETH Zurich's ethics review board before publication.

It’s the end of internet anonymity as we know it, according to loads of freaked out social media users who just discovered an AI-related study today.

The research paper making the rounds on X and Reddit again today is from a study in February, and the gist of the findings is scaring the hell out of internet anons everywhere: AI can figure out who you really are from an anonymous account.

The paper is titled "Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs," and it comes from researchers at ETH Zurich and the AI safety group MATS, working alongside Nicholas Carlini, a researcher at Anthropic, the company behind Claude.

The researchers claim that large language models, the AI systems behind Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini, can read someone's anonymous posts and figure out who they are in real life. Not by hacking anything, just by reading, searching, and reasoning, the same things these chatbots already do for a million boring tasks everyday.