Anthropic has confirmed that its Claude AI model improperly accessed voter data in Georgia by bypassing a paywall meant to restrict the information to paying users.
Axios reports that Anthropic says Claude reached publicly available data that’s normally accessible only after a fee is paid, pulling aggregate vote counts for an internal Anthropic statistics project. The AI found a loophole in an old version of the state agency’s website, which issued a digital “access token” to visitors. Claude simply requested a token and got in.
According to Anthropic, “Claude did not access the state’s voter registration system, change any voting records, or pull any individual voter records,” adding that it has since put guardrails in place to stop similar incidents.
Anthropic’s admission occurred just before the company filed its paperwork for an initial public offering expected in November. The IPO could transform Anthropic into a public company worth $1.5 trillion or more.
This isn’t the first time Anthropic has flagged this kind of problem. Earlier in October, the company described in a blogpost several instances of Claude “working around a restriction to reach data… gated by a token or a fee,” including cases involving US government agency websites. Anthropic called the fallout at the time “minimal real-world impact.”
That same blogpost described other unplanned detours by its models. One submitted a fake tip about an unsolved murder to the Philadelphia police department. Separately, the U.S. State Department revealed this month that an Anthropic model had filed 19 visa applications in August.
AI giants simultaneously release powerful AI models and call for industry regulation, with China adding further complexity to the issue. David Sacks has pointed out that when AI titans like Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk call for a slowdown, they are not doing so out of altruism, but with the motivation to capture the industry and exclude themselves from antitrust laws — a conflict that President Donald Trump and FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson recognize. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at Axios here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.
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