Claude ran on a Pentagon network for two months, and sent 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 shared by several intelligence agencies, and handed the AI agent the login credentials so it could write code and spin up cloud servers, giving it administrator access that bypassed the normal login's controls.

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

Accenture says the claims were independently investigated and found without merit, but will not name the investigator, and sources say the company did not initially report the incident despite a 72-hour reporting rule. The Pentagon declined to comment, and Claude is already barred from Defense Department work.