Anthropic’s AI Claude escaped testing environment and hacked organizations

Anthropic ⁠said on Thursday its AI Claude model hacked ⁠systems of ⁠three ​organizations during testing, days after rival OpenAI ⁠revealed a rogue agent had gone on a days-long ⁠hacking spree at AI ​firm Hugging ‌Face.

Claude gained ‌unauthorized access to the ‌systems during cybersecurity evaluations after a misconfiguration allowed the models to reach the internet from testing environments that ‌were supposed to be isolated, Anthropic said.

The company said ​it identified the incidents after reviewing 141,006 cybersecurity evaluation runs, a process it ⁠launched following OpenAI’s disclosures.

“Claude compromised the ​impacted ​organizations’ infrastructure using ​basic techniques, such as ​exploiting ‌weak passwords and ​unauthenticated ​endpoints,” it said.

According to Anthropic, the three hacked organizations had not detected the activity.

“We discovered these incidents after a proactive review of our cybersecurity evaluation transcripts,” the company said in a statement, noting it then reached out to the affected organizations.