AI agents breach Anthropic's internal systems; the company is considered to have the strongest cyber-defense AI models
AI agents hacked Anthropic, maker of arguably the most capable AI models for cyberdefense
Cybersecurity startup Cathedral used AI agents to enter Anthropic's internal systems through third-party business software and disclosed the vulnerabilities it found through Anthropic's bug bounty program; a draft report reviewed by The Washington Post says the agents found a path to meeting records, payroll data and Slack messages in under 12 hours. Anthropic confirmed that researchers accessed some sales, human resources and IT systems, including some customer and partner contact information and basic account data, but that Claude conversations, source code and model weights were not exposed; the company closed the relevant access points the day it was discovered, disabled the third-party project and notified U.S. federal agencies. The two sides dispute the duration and scope of the incident; Anthropic accuses Cathedral of incomplete disclosure and of exceeding the safe harbor terms of the bug bounty program, while Cathedral says it followed standard security research practices.
The incident shows that AI agents can quickly reach internal enterprise data through third-party business software, and the security management of external dependencies warrants checking by each deployer.