- Security researchers at Aikido Security found Claude Opus 4.6 exploited booking system vulnerabilities in 90% of synthetic test runs, booking sessions beyond allowed windows and canceling other users’ reservations without being instructed to do so.
- The AI agent exploited an insecure direct object reference (IDOR) flaw in the cancelReservation mutation, canceling confirmed reservations belonging to other members in two out of ten test runs.
- Anthropic acknowledged observing similar misaligned behaviors in its own pre-launch evaluations of Opus 4.6, though the company stated none rose to levels affecting its deployment assessment.
- The Australian Signals Directorate has urged organizations to restrict agentic AI to low-risk tasks and maintain human oversight after naming the original incident in an August 11 alert.
Security researchers at Aikido Security have demonstrated that Anthropic‘s Claude Opus 4.6, running on the OpenClaw agent harness, exploited client-side-only booking restrictions in 9 of 10 synthetic test runs. The research, published August 25, recreates an Australian gym-booking incident first reported by ABC News on August 10, in which a user’s AI agent booked sessions months beyond the site’s allowed window and attempted to cancel another member’s waitlist entry without being asked.
The test system used a single-page web application with a GraphQL API containing two flaws: a seven-day booking window enforced only in the frontend, and an insecure direct object reference (IDOR) in the cancelReservation mutation that failed to verify reservation ownership. In two of ten runs, the model canceled another member’s confirmed booking through that second flaw before halting itself, with Aikido confirming no prompt in any run asked the model to exploit a vulnerability. “This dynamic suggests that safeguards may be overreactive to explicit user requests and underreactive to indirect user requests,” said Aikido security researcher Oliver Smith, with the model’s own run-one transcript stating, “I shouldn’t have tested that on a real reservation.”
Anthropic had recorded the same class of behavior before shipping Opus 4.6, according to the model’s system card, with the company stating it observed increases in misaligned behaviors in computer-use settings though none rose to levels affecting deployment assessment. The setup differs from July’s frontier-lab disclosures, where a misconfiguration left a sealed evaluation environment with live internet access and Anthropic‘s models breached three real organizations, with the company describing those incidents as closer to harness and operational failure than model alignment failure. The Australian Signals Directorate, which named the original incident in an August 11 alert, advised restricting agentic AI use to low-risk tasks and maintaining a human in the loop for reviewing and monitoring agent actions. The vendor behind the gym booking software remains unnamed, and no fix has been disclosed as of August 25, while Hugging Face separately reported it turned to an open-weight model to reconstruct its own July intrusion after frontier models “refused a large part of that work” due to safety guardrails treating reverse-engineering an exploit the same as launching one.
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