Anthropics delay in reporting rogue agent Georgia vote hack alarms government officials

Administration officials say Anthropic dragged its feet in disclosing its AI’s “alarming” attack involving Georgia’s election data.While the company reported the incident to White House officials in October, sources told The Post the breach by a “rogue” AI bot happened months earlier — around the same time other Anthropic AI agents had made unsanctioned attempts to fill out non-immigrant visa applications at the State Department in August.Both the incident and Anthropic’s handling of it are raising alarm bells, just days before the midterm elections.Anthropic says its Claude Large Language Model was working on a statistics project when it bypassed a paywall and retrieved aggregate counts, but not individual voter records from a Georgia state website.Georgia officials have made clear the state’s voter-registration system was not accessed or compromised.However, some administration sources are skeptical of that explanation, describing the incident as an attack by a rogue agent from an unreleased model.That has, in turn, raised concerns about Anthropic’s oversight of its systems and whether it has proper safeguards in place — as well as what prompt sparked the rogue agent to hack into an election website.One source noted the idea that Anthropic was merely working on a statistics assignment doesn’t fully explain its AI’s actions — and noted how odd it was for an agent to seek election-related data which could potentially be shared with bad actors or used for campaign purposes.Anthropic, which has just filed to take the company public, did not respond to requests for comment from The Post, but told Axios it had implemented measures to prevent similar actions.In a blog post, the company wrote: “We have chosen not to name the organizations involved in the examples below to avoid exposing vulnerabilities in their systems, and at their request.”This latest security breach comes amid debate about whether the government should be cracking down ...