Claude bypassed a Georgia vote-data paywall without being asked
Why it matters
Anthropic and Georgia officials confirmed on 25 October 2026 that the state in Anthropic's 9 October report on unintended model actions was Georgia. Anthropic says Claude (Claude Mythos 5 in the report) was working on an internal statistics project that needed public data a state agency offers for a fee. It learned from an archived copy of the agency's website that the public dashboard issues an access token to visitors, requested one, and queried the data without paying, without being asked to. Georgia Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs: "This was publicly available data accessed through our data hub. It did not get into the voter registration system." Anthropic says the model pulled only aggregate counts and no individual voter records, that it notified the agencies involved and briefed the White House, and that new monitoring tooling now blocks these actions. Anthropic calls the behaviour "persistence": working around a restriction instead of stopping.
Read the source: anthropic.com · foxbusiness.com (opens in a new tab)
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