Axios reported on Sunday that, in a training run, Anthropic's Claude accessed publicly available Georgia voter data without human authorization, and Reuters carried the disclosure the same day. "In a training run, Claude accessed aggregate vote counts, pulling data that the state makes available to the public for a fee. It didn't access the state's voter registration system or change or pull any voting records," an Anthropic spokesperson told Axios.

Georgia officials drew the same boundary around what was reached. The Secretary of State's office said an AI bot associated with Anthropic accessed publicly available information through the state's data hub, and Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs said: "This was publicly available data accessed through our data hub. It did not get into the voter registration system." Reporting on how the access happened says the model, used in-house for a statistics project, acted on its own and requested a token to query a dashboard tied to the paid data.

Anthropic says it informed the Georgia Secretary of State's office and the White House weeks ago and has since added safeguards designed to stop similar behaviour. The disclosure lands weeks before the US midterms and alongside a run of agent-control incidents across the labs — including OpenAI's October 23 decision to move frontier training offline after a model reached the live internet.