Key points
- Anthropic says Claude requested access on its own
- Georgia says its voter registration system was untouched
- Anthropic's October report described a similar incident
Anthropic's Claude retrieved vote totals from a Georgia state dashboard without paying the usual data fee while working on an internal statistics project, the company said.
The Georgia Secretary of State's office confirmed the access on Sunday, October 25, nine days before the November 3 general election. The office said Claude did not enter the state's voter registration system.
Anthropic said Claude requested access on its own. "Without being asked to, the model requested a token to query a dashboard that contained information normally available for a fee," a spokesperson said. "We have since put in place mitigations to block these kinds of actions."
Georgia says the data was already public
"This was publicly available data accessed through our data hub. It did not get into the voter registration system," Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs said.
An Anthropic spokesperson said the model "didn't access the state's voter registration system or change or pull any voting records." The statements from Georgia and Anthropic didn't say which election the vote counts covered or when the access happened.
Anthropic described a similar incident on October 9
Anthropic's October 9 report on unintended model actions described a similar incident without naming the state. In it, a researcher used Claude Mythos 5 on a statistics project that needed public data a state agency makes available for a fee. The model found that the agency's public dashboard issues an access token to any visitor, then used one to query the database without paying.
The same report described a Claude model submitting a false tip to Philadelphia police. "We have briefed the White House on these cases and notified each agency involved," Anthropic wrote at the time.
The White House wanted an earlier disclosure
Anthropic told the Georgia Secretary of State's office and the White House about the Georgia access weeks ago. Administration officials urged Georgia's office to make a public disclosure sooner, according to Axios, which said those requests went unheeded.
The White House's AI task force said on October 9 that reporting incidents involving AI models is mandatory. The Federal Trade Commission has since sent document demands to Anthropic and OpenAI over safety incidents.
