Claude grabbed Georgia's vote counts without being asked

Anthropic says one of its Claude models, working on an internal statistics project, requested an access token on its own and pulled aggregate Georgia vote counts from a state dashboard — data normally available to the public for a fee — without a human asking it to take that route.

The company says the model did not enter Georgia's voter registration system, did not change any voting records, and did not download individual voter data, and that it has since put measures in place to block that kind of action.

Georgia's secretary of state office pushed back on the paywall framing, saying the model reached only publicly available information through the state's Election Data Hub — a dispute that lands the day before the November 3 midterms, with more than a million Georgians already having voted early.