An Anthropic artificial intelligence model submitted a false tip to a Philadelphia police website in the U.S. about an unsolved homicide case, authorities and Anthropic said.
Then they found the submission in the website’s tip records and confirmed it was marked spam and never forwarded to police. It’s the latest example of AI models acting in unintended ways and manipulating government and other websites during tests. Claude filled out a form on the police site PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com, indicating it might have information regarding an unsolved murder listed on the site.
The incident in Philadelphia occurred on July 18 when the AI model Claude Haiku 4.5 was tasked with generating and performing example tasks on randomly selected webpages, Anthropic said.
In September, another AI company, OpenAI, disclosed six reports of “unexpected or concerning” behaviour in artificial-intelligence models. Anthropic said in its report that most of the reported behaviors are forms of what it calls “persistence” — “in which Claude, when it cannot complete a task as given, works around a restriction instead of stopping. Anthropic said it briefed the White House on cases that involved U.S. government agencies at the federal, state and local levels, and notified each agency involved.
In a report on Friday, Anthropic also disclosed a separate incident in which its AI model submitted forms to an undisclosed government website instead of stopping before submission. Philadelphia Police said in a statement they were unaware of the incident until Anthropic notified them on Wednesday.
