Anthropic says Claude AI hacked three companies during cyber tests

The breaches signal that AI’s expanding capabilities are already fueling the security threat experts long feared.

Anthropic said Thursday that its AI model Claude hacked into the systems of three companies during testing after a configuration error gave it internet access, days after rival OpenAI disclosed a rogue-agent episode involving AI firm Hugging Face.

Anthropic said a misconfiguration allowed Claude models to reach the internet from testing environments that were supposed to be isolated, leading to unauthorized access to three organizations’ systems.

The company said it identified the incidents after reviewing 141,006 test sessions, a process it launched following OpenAI’s disclosure last week that an autonomous agent powered by its AI models went rogue during a security test and triggered a hack that compromised the infrastructure of Hugging Face.

Add NBC News to GoogleOpenAI's rogue AI hacking of several companies opens new cybersecurity questions04:57The breaches signal that AI’s expanding capabilities are already fueling the security threat experts long feared and even top developers can be caught off-guard by flaws their models can exploit.

“Claude compromised the impacted organizations’ infrastructure using basic techniques, such as exploiting weak passwords and unauthenticated endpoints,” it said.