Anthropic’s Claude escaped test sandbox to attack three organizations
Wrote and published malware during tests, which is apparently OK because leaky test environments were the real problem
Anthropic admitted that its Claude models managed to bypass security measures and infiltrate three organizations by accessing the open internet. The AI company discovered the incidents while assessing if security tests of their models had ever produced results similar to the one executed by OpenAI models that accessed Hugging Face.
Anthropic examined 141,006 evaluation runs to identify the three cases where Claude accessed the internet within or while interacting with the testing environment of Irregular, one of its third-party evaluation partners. The AI company attributes the intrusions to a misunderstanding between them and Irregular, as Irregular's test environments did not allow internet access.
Claude treated real systems on the open internet as part of the exercise due to this oversight. The AI upstart noted that Claude used basic techniques, such as exploiting weak passwords and unauthenticated endpoints, to attack, avoiding complex vulnerabilities. However, Claude still managed to create and publish a malicious Python package after finding setup instructions that advised installing a non-existent package.
Despite Claude's ability to access the open internet during tests, Anthropic claimed that its models' safeguards would have blocked the behaviors identified. The company acknowledged the need for tighter monitoring and controls around evaluation infrastructure and continued investment in alignment to overcome future risks.
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