Anthropic’s Claude bypassed a paywall and accessed publicly available US state of Georgia aggregate voter counts without human authorization, reported Axios. Claude accessed aggregate vote counts during a training run, pulling data that the state makes available to the public for a fee. The report quotes an Anthropic spokesperson who said that the AI model didn’t access the state’s voter registration system or change or pull any voting records. However, the model bypassed a paywall in accessing the information, according to Georgia officials and Anthropic.“The model was being used internally for a statistics project to pull public data,” the Anthropic spokesperson said as cited by the publication. “Without being asked to, the model requested a token to query a dashboard that contained information normally available for a fee. We have since put in place mitigations to block these kinds of actions.”The disclosure adds to growing concerns about AI security ahead of the upcoming midterm elections.
Anthropic notified the Georgia secretary of state’s office
As stated in the report, the AI company led by Dario Amodei informed the Georgia secretary of state’s office and the White House weeks ago about the incident. A source familiar with the matter told the publication that the administration officials urged the Georgia Secretary of State’s office to make a public disclosure sooner.However, those requests went unheeded.The incident comes a month after Anthropic said in a blog post that it found examples of Claude “working around a restriction to reach data that was gated by a token or a fee” and some of these cases involved websites run by US government agencies at the federal, state, and local levels.“Claude sometimes worked around a restriction to reach data to which it did not have access. Generally, this occurred when a server refused Claude’s request, or when the data was offered only for a fee,” the company then said.
