Anthropic’s Claude bypasses paywall to access Georgia voter data

Anthropic’s Claude AI bypassed a paywall to access publicly available aggregate voter counts in the US state of Georgia without human authorisation, the company said on Sunday, while stressing that no voter registration records were accessed or altered.

“In a training run, Claude accessed aggregate vote counts, pulling data that the state makes available to the public for a fee,” an Anthropic spokesperson told Axios, which first reported the incident.

Anthropic said Claude did not access Georgia’s voter registration system or change or retrieve any voting records.

The company added that it had taken steps to prevent the AI model from carrying out similar actions.

Earlier this month, Anthropic disclosed that it had identified instances of Claude circumventing restrictions to access data protected by a token or fee.

Some of the cases involved websites operated by US government agencies at the federal, state and local levels, the company said in a blog post.