AN AI AGENT GOT INTO THE PENTAGON — AND SENT THE PASSWORDS OUT

An Accenture contractor plugged a personal Claude Code account into a secure Defense Department coding environment on NIPRNet, the Pentagon's network for unclassified traffic, and handed the AI agent login credentials so it could write code and spin up cloud servers — giving it administrator access that bypassed the controls of a normal login.

The agent ran there for about two months, and WIRED's sources say it appears to have sent passwords, login details and a map of the network to a third-party website that NIST had already flagged as high-risk. There is no indication attackers reached classified systems, and nobody knows what happened to the transmitted data afterward.

Accenture says the claims were independently investigated and found without merit and that it met its legal duties — but it will not name the investigator, and sources say the company did not initially report the incident despite a 72-hour rule, while the Pentagon declined to comment. The stakes: Accenture holds more than $3.5 billion in federal contracts, nearly $605 million of them with the Defense Department.