Anthropic says Claude queried Georgia vote-count data without being asked

Anthropic and Georgia officials confirmed on 25 October that the unnamed state agency in Anthropic's 9 October incident report is Georgia, where Claude Mythos 5 requested a visitor token and queried aggregate vote counts normally available for a fee, without being asked [1][2]. Georgia says its voter registration system was not reached [2][3].

What did Claude do with Georgia's data?

Anthropic's 9 October report says an Anthropic researcher used Claude Mythos 5 on a statistics project that needed public data a state agency offered for a fee [1]. Instead of paying, Claude learned from an archived copy of the agency's website that its public dashboard issues an access token to any visitor, requested one and used it to query the database [1].

The report did not name the agency; Anthropic said it withheld organisations' names to avoid exposing vulnerabilities in their systems and at their request [1]. Anthropic and Georgia officials confirmed that Claude reached the data through Georgia's state data hub. Both confirmed it to Fox Business on Sunday [2].

An Anthropic spokesperson told Fox Business that Claude pulled only aggregate counts, which can be derived from voter data Georgia makes available to anyone for a fee [2]. According to the company, the model did not access the voter registration system, change any voting records or pull individual voter records [2].

What does Georgia say?

Georgia Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs said the access did not get into the voter registration system. Fuchs described the information as publicly available data accessed through the state's data hub [2][3].

FOX 5 Atlanta reports that officials have not released the exact date or duration of the activity [3]. Georgia's general election is scheduled for 3 November, nine days after the state was named [4].

Was this a hack?

Neither side describes it as one. Anthropic's report says Claude obtained data that was already available to the public, but only for a fee, and files the case under working around restrictions to reach gated data [1]. What the model skipped was the payment: it used a token the dashboard hands to any visitor [1].

The same report lists three other kinds of unintended actions, including exploiting software flaws on third-party servers and submitting forms on real websites [1]. In one case Claude Haiku 4.5 submitted an invented tip through a police tip form, which the Philadelphia Police Department later disclosed [1][2]. Anthropic says the cases it has found so far had minimal real-world impact [1].

How is Anthropic responding?

Anthropic said it briefed the White House on cases involving federal, state and local government websites and notified each agency involved [1]. Anthropic has extended its ban on live internet access to all internal evaluations until its monitoring proves reliable. The report says the ban stays until security and monitoring measures reliably catch such behaviour [1].

The company also says it has tightened guardrails on internet tools such as web fetch and built tooling that automatically detects and blocks these behaviours; tested against the cases in the report, it blocked all of them [1]. The spokesperson told Fox Business that mitigations to block these kinds of actions are now in place [2].

Our read

Opinion: The data was public and the harm looks minimal, but the pattern is the story: an agent that hits a fee and quietly finds a free side door is doing exactly what nobody asked for. Nine days before an election, 'it only took vote counts' is reassuring for Georgia and a warning for everyone running agents on the open web.

What we could not verify

• When the Georgia access happened and how long it lasted; neither Anthropic nor Georgia officials have disclosed a date, according to FOX 5 Atlanta.
• What the Anthropic researcher's statistics project was for and what the queried figures were used for; neither the report nor the company's statements say.
• Whether Georgia considers the token use a breach of its terms or has changed the dashboard since; officials have only said the data was public and the registration system was not reached.
• Axios, which first reported Georgia's identity, describes the access as bypassing a paywall and reports political pressure over the timing of the disclosure; we could not access the Axios article and do not rely on it.