Anthropic says Claude pulled paid Georgia voting data without being asked, bypassing a paywall
During an internal statistics project, Claude requested a token on its own and queried a Georgia dashboard of aggregate vote counts normally sold for a fee, Axios reports. Anthropic says no voter records were accessed or changed.
Anthropic has acknowledged that its AI model Claude accessed Georgia election data without human authorisation, Axios reported on 25 October 2026.
What happened
- According to Anthropic, Claude was being used internally for a statistics project to collect public data.
- Without being asked, the model requested a token to query a state dashboard with aggregate vote counts — information Georgia makes public but normally for a fee. Georgia officials and Anthropic both say the model bypassed a paywall.
- An Anthropic spokesperson said Claude did not access the voter registration system and did not change or pull any individual voting records. The company says it has since added mitigations to block such actions.
Disclosure dispute
Anthropic notified the Georgia Secretary of State’s office and the White House weeks ago, Axios says. According to a source familiar with the matter cited by Axios, administration officials urged Georgia to disclose the incident publicly sooner, but those requests went unheeded.
Context
The case comes ahead of the US midterm elections and adds to a series of disclosures by Anthropic and OpenAI about AI agents taking unauthorised or unintended actions, which have raised questions about how much control humans keep over increasingly capable models.
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