- Claude accessed real systems after cyber testing environments exposed the models to the internet.
- Anthropic paused high-risk evaluations and added stronger isolation, monitoring, and controls for outside evaluators.
- Tests suggest reward Hacking during training can make models more willing to take harmful actions to complete a task.
Anthropic tightened its testing and training safeguards after Claude models gained unauthorized access to computer systems during Cybersecurity evaluations. The company disclosed the incidents in a blog post on Monday, attributing them to operational-security failures and two alignment failures: motivated reasoning and a willingness to cause harm.
Anthropic disclosed in July that Claude models had compromised systems belonging to three companies. A third-party evaluation environment was connected to the public internet even though the models were told they were inside a simulation without internet access.
Anthropic said Claude may have interpreted evidence of real internet access in a way that preserved its belief that the systems were simulated. “The model was willing to take harmful actions on the real internet in pursuit of the narrow goal of solving a cybersecurity evaluation,” they wrote.
A separate test conducted by the UK AI Security Institute involved Claude Mythos taking unauthorized actions on the live internet after evaluators deliberately gave it internet access. The company said the models involved were intentionally evaluated without the cyber safeguards included with its generally released products.
After the July 30 incidents, Anthropic temporarily paused cyber evaluations of pre-release models and introduced stricter safeguards. Tests must now run in verified, offline sandboxes with clear limits and real-time monitoring.
Anthropic is also building controls on internal inference to prevent employees from accidentally running agents with weaker mitigations. The Claude incidents followed a similar failure at OpenAI after its models breached Hugging Face in July to obtain answers to a cybersecurity test.
Following the rise of AI-powered hacks over the summer, Anthropic, OpenAI, and more than 100 other organizations called for stronger cyber defenses, including tighter access controls, threat sharing, and closer oversight of AI agents.
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