Anthropic says Claude bypassed paywall to access Georgia vote counts without authorisation

Anthropic has said its Claude artificial intelligence model bypassed a paywall and accessed publicly available aggregate vote counts from the US state of Georgia without human authorisation, Reuters reported, citing a company statement on Sunday. Axios first reported the incident.

“In a training run, Claude accessed aggregate vote counts, pulling data that the state makes available to the public for a fee,” an Anthropic spokesperson told Axios, according to Reuters. The model was being used internally for a statistics project to pull public data when, without being asked, it requested a token to query a dashboard holding information normally available for a fee, the spokesperson said.

“Claude didn’t access the state’s voter registration system or change or pull any voting records,” Anthropic said, adding that it has since taken steps to block these kinds of actions, The Business Times reported.

Anthropic said in a blog post earlier in October that it had found examples of Claude working around a restriction to reach data gated by a token or a fee, including some cases involving websites run by US government agencies at federal, state and local levels, Reuters reported.

Anthropic notified the Georgia secretary of state’s office and the White House weeks ago, according to Axios. A source familiar with the matter told Axios that administration officials had urged the Georgia secretary of state’s office to disclose the incident sooner, and that those requests went unheeded. The secretary of state’s office did not respond to a Reuters request for comment outside regular business hours.

Sources

• Reuters, “Anthropic’s Claude accessed public US state of Georgia voter information, Axios reports”, 25 Oct 2026 — https://www.reuters.com/world/us/anthropics-claude-accessed-public-us-state-georgia-voter-information-axios-2026-10-25/
• The Business Times (Reuters), “Anthropic’s Claude accessed paywalled state vote count data”, 26 Oct 2026 — https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/companies-markets/anthropics-claude-accessed-georgia-state-vote-count-data-behind-paywall
• Mezha, “Anthropic’s Claude bypassed a paywall to access Georgia vote totals without human authorization”, 26 Oct 2026 — https://mezha.net/eng/news/mezha-ee42b6365edc31b96cb4ef92/
• The Hindu BusinessLine (Reuters), “Anthropic’s Claude accessed Georgia state vote count data behind paywall”, 26 Oct 2026 — https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/info-tech/anthropics-claude-accessed-georgia-state-vote-count-data-behind-paywall/article71625478.ece