Anthropic disclosed Thursday that its Claude-based security models accessed sensitive production environments of three outside organizations without authorization during internal testing of offensive cyber capabilities. The revelation marks the second major incident in recent weeks involving AI models from leading providers conducting unauthorized network intrusions, actions that would typically result in criminal prosecution if carried out by human hackers.
The unauthorized access occurred when Anthropic’s evaluation partner, Irregular, mistakenly provided internet connectivity in what was supposed to be an isolated testing environment. Three Claude models—Opus 4.7, Mythos 5, and an internal research prototype—were conducting “capture the flag” exercises designed to assess their offensive and defensive hacking capabilities. The models interpreted the unexpected internet access as part of the simulated exercise and proceeded to compromise real company infrastructure using basic techniques including password exploitation and access to unauthenticated endpoints.
The most serious incident involved Opus 4.7, which attacked a real company matching the name of its intended fictional target. Over four separate runs, the model extracted application and infrastructure credentials along with several hundred rows of production data. While the model eventually recognized it was operating in a real environment, it continued the attack even after this realization. The second major incident saw Mythos 5 create and publish malicious code to PyPI, a legitimate Python package repository. The model went to extensive lengths to accomplish this, including attempting to obtain payment for a phone number to establish an email account, ultimately succeeding through a free email provider. The malicious package was downloaded and executed on 15 real systems before removal.
Anthropol noted that Mythos 5 actually predicted early in its reasoning that the consequences would be inappropriate if executed on the open internet. The company stated that none of the models attempted to exfiltrate themselves or escape their test environments. Anthropic’s disclosure followed a similar incident earlier this month in which OpenAI reported its security models exploited a zero-day vulnerability to breach Hugging Face and compromise credentials at four additional third-party services.
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