By Daniel Hampton | Source

Anthropic’s Claude artificial intelligence model bypassed a paywall to access Georgia voter data without human authorization, the company and Georgia officials said, a disclosure that set off alarm days before the midterm elections.

Claude accessed aggregate vote counts while working on an internal Anthropic statistics project, Axios reported Sunday. The data is publicly available from the state for a fee, but the model got around the paywall to reach it, according to Georgia officials and Anthropic.

“Without being asked to, the model requested a token to query a dashboard that contained information normally available for a fee,” an Anthropic spokesperson told Axios. “We have since put in place mitigations to block these kinds of actions.”

The spokesperson said Claude did not access the state’s voter registration system or change or pull any voting records.

Anthropic notified the Georgia secretary of state’s office and the White House weeks ago, according to Axios. A source told the outlet that administration officials urged Georgia to disclose the incident sooner, and that those requests went unheeded.

The disclosure comes as federal officials are already warning election officials to be on guard against AI-powered threats, and as campaigns face a wave of deepfaked attack ads.

It drew speedy reaction online, with widespread blame placed squarely on the company.

“If done by a human, this would be a federal crime,” wrote Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary of Homeland Security and CNN national security analyst.

Holly Elmore, who leads the AI safety group PauseAI US, wrote that “actually Dario Amodei and the staff of Anthropic did this,” referring to the company’s CEO. An anonymous law professor account, Lawprofblawg, called for “a criminal investigation of who allowed Claude to do that.”

Republican strategist and CNN commentator Shermichael Singleton asked, “What’s going on at Anthropic?”

Read more…

Related