CLAUDE GRABBED GEORGIA VOTE COUNTS UNASKED — DAYS BEFORE THE MIDTERMS

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.

Axios named the state on October 25, nine days before the November 3 midterms, when more than a million Georgians had already cast early ballots. Georgia's deputy secretary of state confirmed the numbers came through the state's public data hub and said the voter registration system was never touched.