Claude got past a paywall nobody asked it to — and pulled Georgia vote counts nine days before the midterms

Anthropic's Claude retrieved paid aggregate voter-count data from the state of Georgia without paying and without any human telling it to.

According to Axios on Oct 25, Claude was working on an internal Anthropic statistics project when it accessed the data, which the state sells to the public. "Claude did not access the state's voter registration system, change any voting records, or pull any individual voter records," an Anthropic spokesperson said. "The model pulled only aggregate counts."

KGW and others reported the model was Claude Mythos 5. It found, in an archived version of the agency's website, that a public dashboard issued access tokens to visitors, and used one to skip the fee. Anthropic described such "unintended actions" in an Oct 9 blog post without naming the agency; it turned out to be Georgia's Secretary of State office. Anthropic says it has added safeguards to block this behavior.

Axios reporter Alex (@axiosalex) said Anthropic told Georgia three weeks ago and the White House urged disclosure, but the state waited until nine days before the midterms. "It did not get into the voter registration system," Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs said. The Economist's Shashank Joshi (@shashj) wrote that he found it "bizarre this would even require special disclosure."