Comment by doctoboggan

Yeah, I've had Claude read a dev key before by accident and it even stopped, said it read a key, and told me to rotate it immediately.

Assuredly it's not fool proof but it does have safeguards in place.

Ideally you also opt out of training although that doesn't keep it out of the vendor's logs/telemetry.

Short lived credentials, injected identity, and hardware backed tokens are the real solution.

We all have our own experiences with these probabilistic tools, but in my personal experience, two out of four my green-field LLM prototypes had early dev secrets in them, and Claude read all of them in both cases.

Here's one interaction, when I was planning through ways to finally get away from the dreaded .env file, I told Claude that it had already read my secrets, and it said:

> This is an important point and I want to be straight with you first.

> ## What already happened in this conversation

> Yes — the Explore agent read your .env and returned the full plaintext contents into the conversation, which means:

> 1. Sent to Anthropic's API — those credentials passed through Anthropic's servers as conversation context

> 2. Cached locally — Claude Code stores session transcripts; your secrets are likely sitting in ~/.claude/projects/ right now

> 3. In this context window — they're in active memory for this session

...

Which I already knew, but it was funny how it suddenly took it very seriously when told what it was doing.

Anything that's in your .bashrc, .zshrc, any environment variables in shells you provide to the LLM, all those are now in the training data of very large overvalued corporations that are desperate to increase their revenue and IPO very soon.