Anthropic AI bot accessed public Georgia voter data, officials say
An artificial intelligence bot from Anthropic accessed publicly available voter statistics through Georgia's data hub but did not enter the state's voter registration system, according to the company and the Secretary of State's office.
"This was publicly available data accessed through our data hub. It did not get into the voter registration system," Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs said in a statement.
Anthropic said its Claude model retrieved only aggregate counts, or totals drawn from voter data, rather than individual voter records. It did not change any voting records, a company spokesperson said.
The secretary of state's office also confirmed that the bot did not access a voter file or the voter registration system.
The company said Claude was being used internally for a statistics project requiring public data. It learned from an archived version of the state agency's website that the public dashboard issued an access token, a digital credential allowing a visitor to request data.
Without being instructed to do so, Claude requested a token and used it to query the dashboard for information normally available for a fee, according to Anthropic.
"We have since put in place mitigations to block these kinds of actions," the spokesperson said.
