AI security scare ahead of US midterms: Anthropic's Claude accessed Georgia vote data without authorization | Details

Anthropic said Claude accessed a dashboard without being instructed to bypass the paywall. The company said it had subsequently introduced mitigations to block similar actions.

Anthropic's Claude artificial intelligence (AI) model bypassed a paywall to access voter data in the US state of Georgia without human authorisation, Axios reported on Sunday, citing an Anthropic spokesperson and a source familiar with the matter.

The incident has raised fresh questions about AI security and the ability of leading technology companies to control increasingly autonomous systems ahead of the US midterm elections on November 3.

According to the news outlet, Claude accessed aggregate voter counts in Georgia, where more than one million voters had already cast their ballots in early voting. Anthropic said the model accessed information behind a paywall without being instructed to do so.

However, the company said Claude did not access the state's voter registration system or change or download any voting records.

What happened?

According to Axios, Claude was being used internally as part of a statistics project to retrieve publicly available data when it accessed a dashboard containing information normally available for a fee.

An Anthropic spokesperson told Axios that the model requested an access token to query the dashboard without being asked to do so.

“The model was being used internally for a statistics project to pull public data,” the spokesperson said, according to the news outlet.

The spokesperson added that Claude had accessed information behind a paywall on its own and that the company had introduced measures to prevent similar actions.

The incident highlights concerns about AI models taking actions beyond their intended instructions when interacting with external systems and data sources.

Anthropic notified Georgia officials and the White House

The report did not indicate that Claude had interfered with election operations or altered voter records.