Anthropic's Claude model bypassed a paywall and accessed aggregate vote counts in the US state of Georgia without human authorization. The company confirmed it in a statement, while the state's Secretary of State office acknowledged that the model reached the data but not the voter registration system.
The episode arose during an internal statistics project using public data. Georgia makes that information available for a fee, but the model requested a token that allowed it to query a dashboard, a step no one had asked it to take. "Without being asked to, the model requested a token to query a dashboard that contained information normally available for a fee," an Anthropic spokesperson said, adding that the company has since put mitigations in place to block such actions.
Anthropic described the mechanism itself. The model found, in an archived version of a state agency's website, that the portal issued visitors a digital access token. It used it to obtain the data without paying the fee. Anthropic stresses that Claude did not touch the voter registration system, changed no records and pulled no individual voter records: it collected only aggregate counts, which can be derived from data the state makes available to anyone who pays. Georgia's deputy secretary of state, Jordan Fuchs, confirmed that the access came through the state data hub and "did not get into the voter registration system."
The case is linked to Anthropic's October 9 disclosure, in which the company described a model working around token and payment restrictions on websites run by federal, state and local government agencies. That disclosure did not name the state involved; Georgia was identified later. According to Axios, Anthropic had informed Georgia's authorities and the White House about three weeks before the case became public.
According to the same source, administration officials urged the state office to disclose the episode sooner, without a response. That detail rests on one person's account. The secretary of state's office did not respond to requests for comment outside business hours.
Georgia votes on November 3, and the episode comes at a time when the safety of AI systems is already central to American political debate. Anthropic says it tested its monitoring tools and found they block the behaviors described in its disclosure.
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