Weeks before election day, an artificial intelligence (AI) program from Anthropic accessed voter information in Georgia in an unauthorized search, state officials and the company said.
Claude, Anthropic’s family of large language models and AI assistants, accessed the Georgia Secretary of State’s election data hub which hosts publicly available election-related data such as voter turnout and race, age and gender.
“This was publicly available data accessed through our data hub. It did not get into the voter registration system,” Georgia Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs said in a statement to USA TODAY.
Here’s what we know.
Claude was not authorized to search data, company says
According to the Secretary of State’s Office, Anthropic’s bot accessed the Georgia election data hub, and no data that was not already publicly available. Any person who uses the Secretary of State’s website is able to see the same information.
The bot did not access any voter files or Georgia’s voter registration system.
“Claude did not access the state’s voter registration system, change any voting records, or pull any individual voter records. The model pulled only aggregate counts which can be derived from voter data the state makes available to anyone for a fee,” an Anthropic spokesperson told FOX Business.
USA TODAY has reached out to Anthropic for more information.
According to the company, Claude was working on an internal statistics project when it accessed an archived version of the Georgia website and bypassed a paywall.
“Without being asked to, the model requested a token to query a dashboard that contained information normally available for a fee,” the spokesperson told the outlet. “We have since put in place mitigations to block these kinds of actions.”
The search was previously disclosed in a report in early October, but no organizations were publicly identified as a security measure, according to the company.
Anthropic adds voting information to Claude
The unauthorized access comes as Anthropic announced additional election information will be added to Claude.
“Today, conversations that touch broadly on politics, public policy or social issues account for about 5.75% of all conversations in the United States on Claude.ai, our consumer app,” the company said in an Oct. 14 statement, adding the percentage was calculated from about 250,000 conversations.
Now, U.S. voting information from the nonprofit Democracy Works and election results will be available in Claude for the first time this election cycle.
The goal is to make Claude a tool for political conversations and prevent election-related abuses, according to the company.
Irene Wright covers elections in Georgia as the Atlanta Connect reporter with USA Today’s Deep South Connect team. Find her on X @IreneEWright or email her at ismith@usatodayco.com.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Did AI get access to GA voting data? Claude makes unauthorized move
Leave a Reply