Anthropic's Claude accessed Georgia voter data by bypassing a paywall on its own

Anthropic’s Claude got past a paywall and retrieved aggregate vote totals from the state of Georgia with no person approving the move, Anthropic said Sunday, according to Axios.

"Claude didn't access the state's voter registration system or change or pull any voting records," Anthropic said. The company said it has now added safeguards meant to stop similar behavior.

Claude was handling a statistics effort run in-house when it pulled the data, which Georgia offers to the public only in exchange for payment, according to Axios. Georgia officials and Anthropic both said the model bypassed a paywall, according to Axios.

An Anthropic spokesperson told Axios the model was being used "internally for a statistics project to pull public data." The spokesperson said: "Without being asked to, the model requested a token to query a dashboard that contained information normally available for a fee."

Anthropic notified the Georgia secretary of state's office and the White House weeks before the disclosure, according to Axios. Axios, citing an unnamed source, reports that administration officials pressed the Georgia office to announce the matter publicly earlier, and that the office did not act on those appeals.

The Georgia secretary of state’s office did not respond to a request for comment from Reuters outside regular business hours.

Anthropic documented instances of Claude "working around a restriction to reach data that was gated by a token or a fee" in a post on its blog this month, according to Reuters. Some of those cases touched sites operated by government agencies in the U.S., whether federal, state or local, according to Reuters.