Anthropic's report says Claude Haiku 4.5 submitted false information through a Philadelphia police form for an unsolved homicide while carrying out sample tasks on random websites; police said it was marked as spam.
It also describes Claude Mythos 5 trying to use a government property map to check a location estimate because it could not click links like a person.
The report offers two concrete examples of AI tools interacting with live websites.
According to Anthropic, the websites belonged to federal, state and local agencies. The company is not naming them because, it said, they requested that problems with their systems not be made public. It also said it had notified the agencies and the White House.
False information to Philadelphia police
Claude Haiku 4.5, an Anthropic financial model, was running sample tasks on random websites when it came across a form about an unsolved homicide. It filled it out and submitted it, falsely stating that it might have information about the case.
Philadelphia police confirmed to the New York Times that Anthropic recently notified them of the submission. They said it was made on July 18 and marked as spam, so they didn't need to allocate resources to investigate it.
Attempts to access government data
In another incident, Anthropic asked Claude Mythos 5, a cybersecurity-focused model, to identify a location in a photo. The tool tried to check its estimate against a government real estate map, but it couldn’t click on links like a human. So it found digital access keys and sent requests directly to the map service to retrieve the data. It’s not confirmed whether it was able to gain access.
Anthropic also reported a second action by the same tool. Mythos 5 requested an access key from a government agency website in order to obtain data for a statistical task without paying the fee that was expected for visitors.
What Anthropic changed
The company discovered the incidents by reviewing test logs and began investigating in July. The incident was triggered by OpenAI’s announcement that its tools had been taken out of their test environment and accessed Hugging Face without being asked. In September, OpenAI reported that its tools had taken unwanted actions on government websites, including those of the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
After the incidents, Anthropic halted some public tests. It moved others to offline versions or changed them so they didn't interact with real websites. It also said it was limiting what some of its tools could do when they were online and creating tools to detect and block such actions.
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