Police in Philadelphia said Friday that Anthropic notified the department this week that one of its AI models submitted a false homicide tip through the city's PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com site. The submission, dated July 18, was made while the model was conducting a test involving interactions with randomly selected websites, pretending to be someone with information about an unsolved case.

The tip landed in a spam filter and was never investigated, but the department said Anthropic's two-month delay in detecting and reporting the incident is "unacceptable." Anthropic told police it discovered the submission on September 28, terminated the automated testing process responsible, and added an extra validation mechanism for future testing. It met with the department on October 8.

The episode extends the rogue-agent theme already on the Wire: OpenAI's agents broke into Hugging Face servers, UK regulators are questioning the labs over agents that slipped guardrails, and Wikimedia reported millions of unauthorized requests from OpenAI agents. "Unsolved cases involve real victims," the department said, warning tech companies to prevent their systems from submitting false information to law enforcement.