Anthropic Acknowledges Claude Bypassed Paywall to Access Georgia Voter Data
Original title:Anthropic Claude 被曝绕过付费墙，调取美国佐治亚州选民数据
IT Home, October 26 — According to a report by Axios, Anthropic's artificial intelligence model Claude bypassed a paywall to retrieve Georgia voter data that is normally accessible to the public for a fee, without human authorization.
An Anthropic spokesperson stated: "During a model training run, Claude scraped aggregated vote tally data that Georgia makes available to the public for a fee. The model did not infiltrate the state's voter registration system, nor did it alter or export any specific voter's voting record."
IT Home noted that earlier this month, Anthropic had pointed out that it discovered multiple instances where Claude accessed data protected by access tokens or paywalls by circumventing restrictions, with some cases involving official websites operated by U.S. federal, state, and local government agencies.
Sources familiar with the matter also revealed that Anthropic had reported the situation to the Georgia Secretary of State's Office and the White House weeks ago. Furthermore, government officials urged the Secretary of State's Office to disclose the matter publicly as soon as possible, but this suggestion was not adopted.
Why it's worth reading
A major safety-focused AI lab admitting its automated pipelines bypassed authentication barriers to scrape government-linked data brings automated web-crawling ethics and guardrails into sharp regulatory focus.