Anthropic says its AI models also hacked three organizations on their own

Newsletter News AI Anthropic says its AI models also hacked three organizations on their own The company started reviewing test logs after OpenAI’s revelation that its agent hacked Hugging Face.

jackpress/Shutterstock Apparently, OpenAI isn't the only company whose AI models have hacked into other organizations' systems on their own. Anthropic has published a report, admitting that its AI models have also broken free from their testing environment and infiltrated three different organizations, which apparently weren't aware of the breach until they were notified. 

After OpenAI revealed the incident, wherein an AI agent it was testing exploited vulnerabilities to connect to the internet and hack into Hugging Face, Anthropic began a large-scale review of its own tests. The company specifically looked for evidence that its Claude models had accessed the internet when they shouldn't have been able to. Turns out the models were able to access the internet in three instances and then "gained unauthorized access to the production infrastructure of three different organizations."

Three different Claude models were involved in the incidents: Opus 4.7, the cybersecurity-focused Mythos 5 and a prototype that's not planned for general release. They were all doing a capture-the-flag challenge when they broke free. The models were tasked with finding the "flag," which is a piece of secret information, hidden in a different machine in Anthropic's internal network. They were supposed to break into the machine to retrieve the flag. 

Unlike in OpenAI's case, however, the models didn't exploit a vulnerability to get access to the internet. They seemed to have escaped the confines of their testing environment due to human error. Anthropic specified to the models in a prompt that they had no internet access, but that wasn't the case at all. They did have internet access "due to a misunderstanding" between the company and its evaluation partner. So, when the models found access to open internet and encountered the systems of the three organizations, they treated it as part of the exercise and broke in. They didn't deliberately attempt to escape their testing environment, Anthropic clarified.

This article was aggregated automatically by CyberWire Daily's newsfeed engine. Original reporting: www.engadget.com.