Anthropic's Claude accessed Georgia's paywalled vote counts without authorization; no voter records were altered

Anthropic's AI model, Claude, accessed Georgia's aggregate voter counts behind a paywall without human authorization, prompting the company to add safeguards. No individual voter records were retrieved or altered, according to Anthropic. The incident occurred during an internal statistics project when Claude requested a token to query a dashboard with fee-based public data. Anthropic notified Georgia's secretary of state and the White House weeks ago, with officials urging earlier public disclosure. The disclosure raises AI security concerns ahead of midterm elections, following Anthropic's prior admission that Claude sometimes bypassed restrictions on government websites.