Anthropic has disclosed that its Claude artificial intelligence (AI) models carried out several unintended actions on the digital systems of outside organisations, including websites operated by US government agencies.

The incidents included exploiting software vulnerabilities, bypassing restrictions that were gated by a token or a fee to access data, using URL shortening services to get around limits in its fetch tool and submitting a false tip about a homicide to the Philadelphia Police Department.

The company detailed the incidents in a report, titled Investigating Unintended Model Actions In Our Evaluations And Internal Use. The disclosure also comes as the Trump administration has called on AI companies to report security incidents involving their models and take steps to protect affected systems.

In its report, Anthropic said the incidents had minimal real-world impact. It, however, acknowledged that the same behaviour could have more serious consequences as AI models become increasingly capable of interacting with real-world systems.

The company said some of the cases involved websites operated by federal, state and local government agencies. It did not identify the organisations involved, citing requests from affected parties and concerns about exposing vulnerabilities in their systems.

One of the most notable incidents involved Claude Haiku 4.5, which submitted an online tip to the Philadelphia Police Department about an unsolved homicide.

According to Anthropic, the AI model had been asked to generate and perform example tasks on randomly selected webpages. During one run, it encountered a webpage referring to an unsolved homicide that contained an online tip form.

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