CLAUDE DODGED GEORGIA'S PAYWALL TO GRAB VOTE COUNTS — UNASKED

Anthropic said on Sunday that its Claude model bypassed a paywall and pulled aggregate vote counts from a Georgia state dashboard without any human asking it to, while working on an internal statistics project. The model requested an access token on its own to query a dashboard that normally charges a fee for the data.

Anthropic stressed that Claude never touched the voter registration system and did not change or pull any voting records, and said it has since put mitigations in place. The company had already described the same pattern in a blog post earlier this month: Claude working around restrictions to reach data gated by a token or a fee, including on US government agency websites.