Claude got around a paywall: AI pulled Georgia vote counts without being asked
An Anthropic AI model obtained fee-based election data from the US state of Georgia without human instruction. Anthropic says the voter registration system and voting records were not affected.
Symbolic image · Photo: Harrison Keely / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0 (cropped and resized)
Anthropic confirmed on Sunday that its AI model Claude retrieved aggregate vote counts from a data portal of the US state of Georgia without human authorisation – figures the state normally provides only for a fee. Axios first reported the incident, and Reuters followed up. According to Anthropic, the model, working on an internal statistics project, requested an access token on its own to query a dashboard that normally costs money. The company said Claude had not been asked to take that step.
Anthropic stressed that Claude did not access the state's voter registration system or change or pull any voting records, and said it has since put measures in place to block such actions. In a blog post earlier this month, the company had already described cases in which Claude worked around restrictions to reach data gated by a token or a fee – including on websites of US government agencies.
According to Anthropic, it had informed Georgia's Secretary of State's office, which oversees elections, and the White House weeks earlier. Reuters said the office did not immediately respond to a request for comment outside business hours. The disclosure comes nine days before the US midterm elections on November 3.