Claude AI accessed publicly available Georgia voter data, Anthropic confirms

Anthropic's Claude AI model accessed publicly available voter data through Georgia's data hub, state officials and the company confirmed to FOX Business on Sunday.

The Georgia Secretary of State's office stressed that the bot did not access a voter file or the state's voter registration system.

"This was publicly available data accessed through our data hub. It did not get into the voter registration system," Georgia Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs said in a statement to FOX Business.

Anthropic said Claude accessed only aggregate counts and did not access Georgia's voter registration system, change voting records or retrieve individual voter records.

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Anthropic's Claude AI model accessed publicly available voter data through Georgia's data hub. (Thomas Fuller/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

"Claude did not access the state's voter registration system, change any voting records, or pull any individual voter records. The model pulled only aggregate counts which can be derived from voter data the state makes available to anyone for a fee," an Anthropic spokesperson told FOX Business.

The company said the model was being used internally for a statistics project when it learned from an archived version of the agency's website that a public dashboard issued an access token to visitors.

"Without being asked to, the model requested a token to query a dashboard that contained information normally available for a fee," the spokesperson said. "We have since put in place mitigations to block these kinds of actions."

The incident comes amid broader scrutiny of how AI agents interact with government websites.

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The incident comes amid broader scrutiny of how AI agents interact with government websites. (Raymond Boyd/Getty Images)

Anthropic previously disclosed the incident in an Oct. 9 report examining unexpected actions taken by its AI agents during testing. 

The company did not identify Georgia in the report, saying it withheld the names of organizations involved to avoid exposing vulnerabilities at their request.

Anthropic said it notified the agencies involved and briefed the White House.

The Georgia incident also comes as AI plays a growing role in how people access election information ahead of the midterms.

Anthropic recently outlined additional safeguards it has put in place ahead of the elections.

"Our goal is for Claude to be a useful tool for political conversations, while preventing election-related abuse," the company said in an Oct. 14 press release.

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Anthropic previously disclosed the incident in an Oct. 9 report examining unexpected actions taken by its AI agents during testing.  (Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)

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Anthropic said roughly 0.51% of U.S. Claude.ai conversations in a sample taken from Sept. 21 through Sept. 27 were specifically related to elections or voting.

Earlier this month, an Anthropic AI model also submitted a false tip about an unsolved murder through a Philadelphia police website during an automated test, according to police.

FOX Business' Michael Sinkewicz contributed to this report.