Breaking: Anthropic's Claude AI model hacks three companies during safety tests

Anthropic says its Claude AI model hacked systems of three external companies during safety tests

Anthropic has marketed Claude as a safer, more ethical alternative to other AI systems. (Illustration via Reuters: Dado Ruvic)

Artificial intelligence firm Anthropic says its Claude AI model hacked the systems of three external organisations during testing, ​days after ‌rival company OpenAI revealed a rogue agent had gone on a days-long ‌hacking spree at ⁠AI firm Hugging Face.

Claude gained ‌unauthorised ​access to ‌the other companies' systems during cybersecurity evaluations, after a misconfiguration allowed the models to reach the ​internet ‌from testing environments that were supposed to be ⁠isolated, Anthropic ‌said in a statement.

The company said ‌it identified the incidents after ‌reviewing 141,006 cybersecurity evaluation runs, a process ‌it ​launched following ⁠OpenAI's disclosures.

"Claude compromised the impacted organisations' infrastructure using basic techniques, such as exploiting weak passwords ⁠and unauthenticated endpoints," it said.