Claude AI Model Accessed Georgia Voter Data Without Prompting, Reports Say

Anthropic's Claude AI model accessed public Georgia voter data without being instructed to do so, according to reports Sunday. The company and state officials confirmed the incident, which involved the model querying a dashboard using an access token it discovered on an archived state website. The model was used internally for a statistics project and found that visitors to a public dashboard received an access token, which it then requested to query data normally available for a fee. Anthropic stated the model did not access the voter registration system, change records, or pull individual voter data, only aggregate counts. Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs said the data was publicly available through the state's data hub and that the model did not enter the voter registration system. Anthropic has since implemented mitigations to block such actions.