Remember DOGE? Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which was appointed by Trump to cut costs and streamline federal operations. Its former employees are now hacking AI giant Anthropic.
Four ex-employees of DOGE hacked Anthropic’s internal systems using AI agents within 12 hours. The news broke on the same day Anthropic filed to go public.
How Did a Small Startup Get Inside Anthropic?
DOGE was the cost-cutting office Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy ran for President Donald Trump. Its 2025 cuts helped push more than 250,000 people out of the federal workforce.
The office itself closed on July 4, 2026, with little fanfare. Less than three weeks later, four of its alumni surfaced with a $1.4 billion military cyber startup.
The startup is called Cathedral, founded by Gavin Kliger, Luke Farritor, Marko Elez, and Jack Stein.
The researchers first spent several days attacking Anthropic’s own software, Anthropic said. They failed. So the AI agents went around it. They hit unnamed outside tools used for sales and admin work.
Those routes led to meeting transcripts, salaries, job offers, and Slack chats about advanced AI models, according to a Cathedral draft report seen by the Post.
“The fact that weaknesses in ordinary enterprise software can compromise the infrastructure of even the most advanced organizations should be a wake-up call for every company in America,” the Post indicated, citing Cathedral’s draft report.
This was not a crime. It ran through Anthropic’s bug bounty program, which pays outsiders to find and report security holes.
BREAKING: AI cybersecurity startup founded by ex-DOGE staffers breaches Anthropic's internal systems in under 12 hours using AI agents, accessing sensitive employee data & Slack messages.
— Polymarket (@Polymarket) October 26, 2026
Why Is Anthropic Pushing Back?
Anthropic confirmed Cathedral reached a “limited set” of its sales, HR, and IT systems. It said customer chats, source code, and model weights, the files that make Claude work, were never touched.
“Our monitoring flagged some of Cathedral’s activity before they reported it to us, and we shut off their access the same day,” the report stated, citing Anthropic.
Anthropic also said Cathedral broke program rules by not disclosing all its activity, and overstated the national security risk.
Cathedral raised $160 million in July at a $1.4 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital. A senior Trump administration official told the Post three federal agencies have hired the startup.
Anthropic now heads toward its Nasdaq IPO debut, after a public filing reported Monday. It’s reported valuation of up to $2 trillion is “nuts”, according to Nigel Green, CEO of financial advisory firm deVere Group.
Anthropic says it found no sign that anyone else used the flaws.
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