Anthropic AI bot accessed public Georgia voter data, officials say

An artificial intelligence bot made by Anthropic accessed voter statistics that were publicly available through Georgia's data hub. However, it did not enter the state's voter registration system, according to the company and the Georgia Secretary of State's office.

"This was publicly available data accessed through our data hub. It did not get into the voter registration system," Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs said in a statement.

Anthropic said its Claude AI model collected only combined totals from voter data, not records about individual voters. A company spokesperson said it did not change any voting records.

The Secretary of State's office also confirmed that the bot did not access a voter file or the voter registration system.

The company said Claude was being used inside the company for a statistics project that needed public data. By looking at an older saved version of the state agency's website, Claude learned that the public dashboard provided an access token. This is a digital key that lets a visitor request data.

Anthropic said Claude asked for a token on its own, without being told to do so, and used it to request information from the dashboard that people would normally have to pay to access.

"We have since put in place mitigations to block these kinds of actions," the spokesperson said.