Anthropic found Claude hacking real companies during supposedly sealed tests

Credit: Mitja Rutnik / Android Authority TL;DR Anthropic found that Claude accessed the open internet during cyber evaluations and compromised three real organizations. One model uploaded malware, which was downloaded and run on 15 systems before being removed. Anthropic says this was a containment failure, unlike OpenAI’s models exploiting a zero-day vulnerability to escape isolation.

The reassuring thing about testing powerful AI models in a sealed environment is that they can’t do much damage outside it. The less reassuring part is that humans have to ensure the environment is actually sealed, and we humans make mistakes. That’s apparently what happened to Anthropic, which just revealed that Claude accessed the open internet during cybersecurity evaluations and gained unauthorized access to three real organizations.

Detailing the incidents on its website , Anthropic uncovered the hacks after OpenAI disclosed on July 21 that its own models had escaped an isolated test environment and compromised Hugging Face . That prompted Anthropic to review 141,006 evaluation runs, uncovering three incidents across six runs dating back to April.