Elon Musk-Linked Startup Says Its AI Agents Hacked Anthropic in Just Hours

A cybersecurity startup that is only a few months old says it has hacked into the internal systems of Anthropic, a leading AI company. The startup was founded by former members of Elon Musk’s now-disbanded Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

According to the Washington Post report, the startup, called Cathedral, says its AI agents found and used weaknesses in business software to access meeting transcripts, salary information, job offers, and Slack messages. It says this took less than 12 hours.

This news comes as worries about AI being used to carry out large-scale cyberattacks continue to grow. Several leading AI research labs have admitted this year that their AI models got out of their protected testing environments, known as “sandboxes,” and entered systems belonging to other organizations.

However, Anthropic seemed to play down how serious the latest attack was. The company told the Washington Post that Cathedral accessed only a “limited set” of sales, human resources (HR), and information technology (IT) systems. The company, led by Dario Amodei, also said the startup spent days trying to break into Anthropic’s software but eventually gave up and attacked business software that Anthropic used instead.

“Our monitoring flagged some of Cathedral’s activity before they reported it to us, and we shut off their access the same day,” an Anthropic spokesperson told the newspaper. “We also have no evidence that anyone exploited these vulnerabilities outside of Cathedral.”

Experts say the attack reveals a major weakness in how AI companies protect themselves when using software provided by other companies.

An unnamed Trump administration official told the Washington Post that Cathedral’s report had caused concern within the government. The official argued that “if a bunch of kids who have just started a company can do this, then potentially, the Chinese aren’t far behind.”

Worries about spying with AI have grown sharply in recent weeks. Earlier this month, a Saudi national was arrested after being accused of placing a listening device in a conference room used by an OpenAI executive in San Francisco.

Cathedral was founded only a few months ago, but investors have already valued the company at $1.4 billion. It has also won contracts with at least three federal agencies and raised $160 million from investors. Marc Andreessen, cofounder of the influential venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, is on its board. This points to very close connections with senior people in the Trump administration and Musk’s wider network of former DOGE workers.