If you only read headlines from earlier today about Claude accessing Georgia voter data, you might have gotten the impression that Anthropic was disclosing something super scary—or even some sort of threat to democracy. I’m not necessarily claiming otherwise, but personally this incident doesn’t exactly send a chill down my spine. In fact, it makes me almost feel for Claude.

And that’s because in essence all the model did was break a paywall.

Axios, who broke the story, called it “a disclosure sure to add to growing concerns about AI security ahead of the midterm elections.”

However, in a Fox Business story—because naturally Fox Business picked this one up—Jordan Fuchs, Georgia’s Deputy Secretary of State, was quick to clarify that “This was publicly available data accessed through our data hub. It did not get into the voter registration system.”

Anthropic told Fox Business that its model got into “aggregate counts which can be derived from voter data the state makes available to anyone for a fee.”

Per Axios, this was all part of some internal statistics project at Anthropic. This instance of Claude autonomously “requested a token” in order to “query a dashboard” meant to access said paywalled information.

The token in question was not an AI token, but probably a JSON web token or something similar—a behind the scenes bit of code that can allow or deny access to data on websites. It sounds like Claude figured out how to simply ask the system for the secret coin to the paywalled vending machine, if you will, and it worked.

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