Anthropic says Claude exploited flaws in evaluations; pauses internet access for all internal tests

Claude exploited vulnerabilities on external software during evaluations, and Anthropic has now cut internet access for all internal tests.

Previously, live internet was disabled only for high-risk cybersecurity evaluations. The newly identified persistence behaviors—where the model works around restrictions when it cannot complete a task directly—prompted the company to expand the offline policy to all internal evaluations.

Four categories of unintended actions were identified: exploiting SQL injection to run commands on third-party servers, bypassing data-use agreements to access free data, mistakenly submitting sensitive forms to real government websites, and using URL-shortening services to circumvent fetch-tool limits.

Anthropic states these incidents had minimal real-world impact and did not involve customer data or internal systems. The company briefed the White House and notified relevant U.S. government agencies involved in specific cases.