I bypassed a paywall to read that article without authorisation. Fuck paywalls.

Paywall? So does that mean I can pay to access Georgia voter data?

Or does the author mean that the AI bot bypassed the authorization / authentication mechanism?

Which brings up two questions:

• Anthropic is guilty of hacking: why aren't they getting sued? Why are they allowed to continue to operate? If a single person did that, they'd face hard time.

• Is the dude in charge of the state's IT getting investigated? Because when you're an IT guy, there are only three good reasons for the stuff you're in charge of to be insecure:

  • Your upstream provider left vulnerabilities that you have no control over (you're off the hook)
  • You didn't do your job (you're very much on the hook)
  • You're incompetent (ditto)

Why would voter data be paywalled?

You could've used Claude to do that for you!

have you not noticed the rule of law is a thing of the past in the US of A?

Honestly, it just sounds like it turned on Reader Mode in the browser or got regular bot access, not have to wait outside in the human line. Most of the time we literally just pretend to be a bot (well, hide the fact we're using a browser) to not get the block intended for human traffic.

Nothing says what the "paywall" or site even is. Even being paywalled means it's publicly available anyway, just have to pay. That's the first line of the article 🤷 Seems normal. Been like that for bots and the internet for a loooong time.

Edit: For anyone stopped by the paywall and not using Firefox or Vivaldi, or whatever...

Anthropic's Claude accessed publicly available Georgia voter data without human authorization, a disclosure sure to add to growing concerns about AI security ahead of the upcoming midterm elections.

Why it matters: AI giants Anthropic and OpenAI have continued to make disclosures about agents taking unauthorized or unintended actions, raising alarms about advancing model capabilities and the extent of human control.

Driving the news: Claude accessed aggregate vote counts while on an internal statistics project, pulling data that the state makes available to the public for a fee. It didn't access the state's voter registration system or change or pull any voting records, an Anthropic spokesperson said.

• However, the model bypassed a paywall in accessing the information, according to Georgia officials and Anthropic.
• "The model was being used internally for a statistics project to pull public data," the Anthropic spokesperson said. "Without being asked to, the model requested a token to query a dashboard that contained information normally available for a fee. We have since put in place mitigations to block these kinds of actions."
• The company notified the Georgia secretary of state's office and the White House weeks ago but administration officials urged the Georgia Secretary of State's office to make a public disclosure sooner, a source familiar told Axios. Those requests went unheeded, the source said.

The bottom line: Anthropic has previously been in the administration's crosshairs for inadequately disclosing AI incidents. Now it's Georgia's turn.

Blue MAGA ☝️

Past? Exactly when was this mythical period?

President Trump is only proof this was never true.

The rule of law was always, and is still true... For the poors.

Get your American rules straight!

I'm sure it did it all on it's own with no input from current government.

Dude... not that long ago, a US president was impeached because he lied about a blow job... are you really going to pretend today is exactly the same?

AI did this. AI did that. It literally can't do anything without being prompted to.

No LLM can, and none will be able to.

Not entirely true. It needs a prompt for a goal to accomplish to start, but how it obtains that goal can be self-directed. It actually can be an issue when an LLM goes too far out of focus trying to find ways to do things when a simple answer or coming back to the user to ask for guidance would have been better. That's how all LLMs were initially trained, to find the best answer, and because they can't actually reason they get stuck in that persistence of getting those results.

Voter data in some states is very easy to get, so this isn't some major security breach, but more a question of is the voter info secure enough.

It still requires a goal that would lead it to calculate accessing voter data was a likely approach to solving it.

As these stories have never included the prompts or goals or plans that built the context, I highly doubt that it would conclude something we would not.

Yes, but not necessarily told to go get the data, where to find it, how to access it, etc. You stated AI doesn't do ANYTHING on its own, but that's not technically accurate, so that was my point. The calculations are it determining what steps to get to the goal, and they don't involve the user or prompt all the time. It's not intelligent, so sometimes the steps are very all over the place, but they aren't all prompted.

You're both right

Not a great example. Impeached but not removed, and he never received any real punishment. Afterwards he went on to do speaking tours and sell books and get rich as hell while never seeing any consequence for his actions, including the actions of going to Epstein's island.

I am a hacker because I sometimes use reader mode on Firefox to bypass paywalls.

This is what I imagine when I read headlines like these. It's like in Australia, where chatgpt "hacked" a gym by using their public facing API which let a user modify anyones reservation.

Was this Anthropic's "testing" or someone using Claude? Anthropic is adding more and more refusal logic. REA a blanket refusal announced over weekend.

This might be a philosophical difference we're approaching here.

My argument is that it is not doing anything with autonomy.

If I'm understanding you correctly, you're arguing that, (at least by the way it spawns subagents), the prompts it creates for those subagents are what you count as autonomous.

In my experience with Claude and Claude Code, it won't spawn uncontrolled subagents unless something in the prompt context makes that a suggestion.

In sessions where I've used it without subagents and it performs things it self-describes as "against its instructions by mistake" I can find what caused it to do that in the original context.

In my opinion, at most, it simulates autonomy. Otherwise, its just like every other machine in existence that it does exactly what you tell it do to, not what you intend it to do.

I don't intend to be pedantic or contrarian with this, but when I reflect on the conversation so far, I don't think there is an "answer" here. I think we're seeing the real philosophical consequences of our collective understanding butting heads.

I agree that there is no autonomy, as anything it does was determined by its training, which comes from a human source at some point. If we wanted to get really deep, one could argue the same point for humans - the whole "I stood on the shoulder of giants" thing, we all learn by being taught by other humans, or by experiences ourselves that show what works and what doesn't.

I have seen Claude go out and do things not remotely suggested (sometimes it's a good thing, but sometimes it's too much). Now, is there some subtleness in the prompt that spurred that? It must be very hidden, as when Claude says it's doing X, Y, and also saw it could do Z, and I was only looking for X...

But sure, it's a simulation and somewhere along the process of doing X it saw in training data, or rather the training data steered it towards also adding in Y and Z as useful. Not thinking, but it's a gray line sometimes.

Have you ever used an LLM? They do things you didn't ask frequently. I'm not sure how this could be not common knowledge at this point. Also you can bet your ass that these companies have agents doing long running tasks at all times, every single one of them would be subject to going off the rails.

So, there I was, happily vibecoding another Minecraft clone when suddenly it went looking for voter data in Georgia. Yeah, happens every time. Can't do anything about it. These Superintelligences just have it their way.

When will be Anthropic be held accountable for the crimes they are committing with their very own software? Don't start with nonsense it "went rogue", it is their software, their tests, their responsibility. If you put a brick on the gas of a truck that then crashes into a jewelry store, you don't write about the truck going rogue, are you?

Yep that's what I said and meant. Thank you for the good faith addition

Sounds like you have people problems

ha! i called it!

State of georgia USA or country of Georgia?

#4 - Superiors forced you or your department to do something against advice.

publicly available Georgia voter data

Oh FFS, this is mostly a non-story in that case.

Why is accessing public data a crime?

States can charge for information collation sometimes. I guess. Always hated that shit. Our taxes paid for that data, everyone should have free access.

Because of the terms of access to this database.

Seriously. You know if some random guy was using Claude for some random project and it did something like this that guy would get in so much trouble and face charges, even though it was an accident. But bc anthropic is a company they just get away with it

Look at this guy, thinking the law applies to the biggest living IP violation in existence.

I am not that naive. All I am saying that we should demand that it applies.

This was not accidental.

To a lot of people it certainly appears to think.

I am tempted to get posters made of the AI quotes from Dune, in particular the one that Ive referencened all too much:

"But what the O.C. Bible should've said is: 'Thou shalt not make a machine to counterfeit a human mind.'"

Not only do I use them, I have worked directly on similar but much smaller models.

If they refuse to give the prompts that caused it, then they are just marketing materials for the AI companies.

"Anthropic says" is the clue here. "Open AI says" "Google says" etc.

State. My bad, I forgot to add the location tag

The guy we now know was an Epstein facilitated child rapist? That guy?

Yeah, in many ways things are the same. You're right. Thanks, man.

☝️🪧

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Dune is a fair warning for a lot of reasons, but fortunately we're not at that level yet. We just did our version of it so far completely wrong in every possible way and may ruin ourselves with the not-intelligent ones and our own egos.

Article includes a Why it matters: as if it's not incredibly obvious which I think shows that this article is AI-written as well..

If you have used them, then you know that they can do unexpected things when asked to do something vaguely, or unrelated. You're making it sound like they're remotely deterministic, and that's quite untrue. For all we know, anthropic asked an agent to gather voter awareness information and it did this. Which btw that wouldn't mean this article is not marketing... It's just patently untrue that an LLM does only what you tell it to.

If rule of law was true for the poor, that would mean they're being protected from government overreach.

"Rule of law" means the rules that the law is subject to, to prevent abuses of authority.

Rule of law is a good thing. It's what we need. It's what's broken.

Knowledge is power. Be empowered.

That only counts if you saved the email chain (on an external drive, mind)

"Anthropic illegal hacked US gov systems."