An artificial intelligence bot linked to Anthropic accessed publicly available Georgia election data through the state’s official data hub, but did not breach the secure voter registration system, officials have said.
The software obtained aggregate vote counts while being used for an internal statistics project, according to Anthropic. The company said the information was normally available to the public for a fee.
Georgia’s Secretary of State’s Office said the activity was confined to public data feeds and did not expose non-public files or alter any voting records.
Jordan Fuchs, Georgia’s deputy secretary of state, said: “This was publicly available data accessed through our data hub. It did not get into the voter registration system.”
Anthropic said the model had not been instructed to obtain the information. Instead, it requested an access token for a dashboard containing data that the state usually provides for a charge.
“The model was being used internally for a statistics project to pull public data,” an Anthropic spokesperson said. “Without being asked to, the model requested a token to query a dashboard that contained information normally available for a fee.”
The company said it had introduced measures to prevent similar behaviour. Anthropic also reported the incident to Georgia officials and the White House, according to reports on the disclosure.
Officials have not said exactly when the data was accessed or how long the automated activity lasted. It also remains unclear whether the files were used for research, training or another purpose.
