AI Deanonymizes Anonymous Accounts for $4

Researchers at ETH Zurich, MATS and Anthropic built an AI pipeline that matched anonymized Hacker News accounts to real LinkedIn profiles at 90% precision, correctly naming 226 of 338 users. The attack uses only web search, embeddings and reasoning models like GPT-5.2, costing roughly $1 to $4 per target with no hacking or data breach involved.