Cathedral, a new startup founded by members of the now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), claims it breached sensitive systems at AI giant Anthropic.

According to a draft report from Cathedral reviewed by the Washington Post, the startup notified Anthropic that its AI agents had found ways into the company’s internal systems by exploiting vulnerabilities in third-party business software. Cathedral said its agents took less than 12 hours to find paths to sensitive information, including meeting transcripts, salaries and job offers, and Slack messages. However, Anthropic said the researchers had previously spent several days unsuccessfully trying to breach its software directly.

Anthropic confirmed that the researchers gained access to a “limited set” of its sales, human resources, and IT systems, including customer and partner business contact information and some basic user account records. However, the company said the researchers did not access Claude users’ conversations, source code, or AI model weights. The hack was part of a cybersecurity testing program in which Anthropic rewards researchers who find vulnerabilities, but the company accused Cathedral of violating the program’s rules by failing to disclose the full extent of its activity. Anthropic did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.

Cathedral is an AI-driven cybersecurity startup focused on military applications founded by former DOGE staffers Gavin Kliger, Luke Farritor , Marko Elez and Jack Stein. Kliger was also previously the Pentagon’s chief data officer and was reportedly involved in the Pentagon’s high-profile fallout with Anthropic . Another co-founder, Elez, had to resign from DOGE after he was linked to some ridiculously racist tweets like “normalize Indian hate” and claiming that he was “racist before it was cool,” though Musk promptly rehired him.

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