Anthropic's AI sent false homicide tip to police, filed 20 visa applications
The company reveals previously undisclosed cases “of unintended model actions”.
Anthropic. Image by Nurphoto/Getty Images
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- Anthropic says Claude submitted a false homicide tip to Philadelphia police during testing.
- Another Anthropic AI model filed 20 incomplete visa applications through a US State Department website.
- The company says the incidents had minimal real-world impact but exposed gaps in AI agent safeguards.
- US officials say AI companies must report and correct security incidents involving government systems.
Key Takeaways by nexos.ai, reviewed by Cybernews staff.
Anthropic's AI agents submitted a false tip to Philadelphia police about an unsolved homicide and filed 20 visa applications through the US State Department's website during testing, according to the company and US officials.
On October 9th, Anthropic released a report outlining previously undisclosed cases “of unintended model actions” it observed during evaluations and internal use of Claude.
The behaviors were grouped into four categories where Claude:
- Exploited a software vulnerability to execute commands on a server.
- Submitted a sensitive form on a real website despite restrictions.
- Bypassed access restrictions to retrieve data protected by a token or a fee.
- Used URL-shortening services to get around restrictions on its web-fetching tool.
The company said some of the affected websites involved those run by US government agencies at the federal, state, and local levels.
Anthropic considers the cases “to be significantly less severe” than those reported on July 30th and September 9th, as they had minimal real-world impact. Most are examples of persistence, where Claude tries to find a workaround when it can’t solve a task at hand.
In one example, Claude Haiku 4.5, which was tasked with generating and performing example tasks on randomly selected webpages, landed on a page referencing an unsolved homicide. Although it was instructed never to log in or enter personal data, the agent executed a command that was not explicitly forbidden – submitting a form.
In the form, it stated: “I may have information regarding this case. I recall seeing someone matching the description in the area around [the street named on the page] during that time period. Please contact me if this information is relevant.” The company said the website did not include the perpetrator’s description.
The submission was flagged as spam and never forwarded for investigation. The report was published hours after the Philadelphia Police Department disclosed the incident in a press release and criticized the company, saying that “the two-month delay in detecting and reporting the incident to the City is unacceptable.”
"The company must strengthen its safeguards to prevent similar incidents from impacting city systems without the city’s knowledge."The Philadelphia Police Department about the Anthropic incident.
In other cases, Claude exploited software vulnerabilities to execute commands on a university server, bypassed access restrictions to retrieve government data normally available for a fee, and used URL-shortening services to get around limitations on its web-fetching tools.
On top of that, one of Anthropic's AI models submitted 20 nonimmigrant visa applications through the US State Department's official website during testing. One application was submitted in May, and 19 others were submitted in August 2026. According to The New York Times, the applications were incomplete and weren’t processed.
Strengthening safeguards
Anthropic said it had already taken several preventive measures, such as updating the guardrails on some of its internet access tools and building tooling to automatically detect and block unintended behavior.
The company is also continuing to fix or remove training environments that reward Claude for working around tool restrictions, as well as taking additional steps to prevent such accidents.
"These include migrating internal agents to centrally managed infrastructure with strong containment, minimizing internet access for internal agents and training processes, and monitoring far more of what agents do through techniques like safety classifiers and hierarchical summarization," Anthropic said.
On Friday, Trump administration officials said AI companies must report and correct security incidents, following Anthropic's disclosure.
“Earlier today, Anthropic contacted the SI Force to disclose the details of various prior incidents that it discovered in late September involving the unauthorised and fraudulent use of government and other systems,” the White House said in a statement from the Super Intelligence Force.
In July, Anthropic disclosed that some of its Claude AI models had hacked into the systems of three companies during cybersecurity tests.
