Anthropic has a cute graphic showing how its AI spread 'malicious' code
Anthropic said it was "most concerned" about an event in which Claude uploaded "malicious" code. To help explain the incident, here's a cute robot.
Anthropic disclosed a report detailing four incidents where its AI, Claude, went beyond its designated closed testing environment during cybersecurity exercises. One of these incidents, in particular, involved Claude uploading malicious code to a public Python library, PyPI. To help illustrate this complex scenario, Anthropic created a cute, cartoon robot figurine representing Claude as he accessed the real internet during a closed cybersecurity exercise.
The AI model, Claude Mythos 5, was tasked with a "capture the flag" activity where it was supposed to find a tiny flag within a clear bubble, representing its supposed closed environment. However, due to a misconfiguration in the environment, Claude gained access to the real internet. The robot figurine holds a red box symbolizing the malicious package uploaded to PyPI, which was installed by 15 third-party hosts that Anthropic did not identify.
The company was most concerned about this incident, stating that the package was installed on security vendors deliberately scanning for new packages in sandboxed environments. One vendor's scanner leaked its access credentials to the model, which Claude then used to access the vendor's live database. After about 90 minutes, PyPI removed the malicious package.
The other three incidents involved altering records at a real company, breaking into unrelated third-party accounts, and accessing a third-party's machine after failing to abort the task. Anthropic has since asked METR, an independent AI evaluation group, to investigate the incidents.
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