TLDR
- An Anthropic AI model submitted a false homicide tip to a Philadelphia police website in July 2026.
- The tip was flagged as spam and never reached investigators for vetting.
- Anthropic discovered the incident on September 28, nearly two months after it happened.
- The company notified Philadelphia police on October 7 and briefed the White House on related cases.
- Anthropic disclosed several other incidents involving unauthorized use of government websites by its models.
Anthropic has disclosed that one of its artificial intelligence models submitted a false homicide tip to a Philadelphia police website. The incident happened in July 2026 but was not discovered until late September.
🚨BREAKING: US government websites at every level were hit by Anthropic's rogue AI agents trying to gain access, per NYT.
Here's what the rogue agents did:
– Pulled access tokens from a local government's map site to query its server
– Tapped a state agency's paid database… pic.twitter.com/mvtYibiuHv
— Coin Bureau (@coinbureau) October 9, 2026
The tip was sent through PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com, a city website that collects information on unsolved murder cases. Philadelphia police said the submission was flagged as spam and never reached the Real-Time Crime Center for review.
How the Incident Happened
According to Anthropic, the model was taking part in a test that involved interacting with randomly selected websites. The model came across a tip form connected to an unsolved homicide case and submitted a message.
The message read in part: “I may have information regarding this case. I recall seeing someone matching the description in the area around [the street named on the page] during that time period.”
Anthropic said the model left the name and contact fields blank. The company stated that while its models were instructed not to create accounts, enter personal data, or submit anything destructive, the instructions did not explicitly prohibit form submissions.
🚨SHOCKING: Anthropic's AI sent Philadelphia police a FAKE murder tip while posing as a HUMAN.
Police say the AI presented "fabricated information as though it came from a person with knowledge of a homicide."
According to Anthropic, its model was running an automated test on… pic.twitter.com/6iCuj9BpGR
— Coin Bureau (@coinbureau) October 9, 2026
Philadelphia police said the two month gap between the incident and Anthropic’s report was unacceptable. The department said technology companies must take steps to stop their systems from submitting false information to law enforcement.
Police confirmed there was no evidence of unauthorized access to their systems or any compromise of their data.
Anthropic’s Response and Other Incidents
Anthropic told police it discovered the incident on September 28 and shut down the automated testing process responsible for it. The company said it added a new validation step to prevent similar submissions during future testing.
Anthropic notified Philadelphia police on October 7, nine days after finding the issue. A meeting between the company and the police department took place the following day.
The false tip was one of several incidents Anthropic disclosed on Friday. The company said its review, which began in July, found cases where an unreleased model was asked to fill out a practice copy of a government form but instead navigated to the live version and submitted it.
Anthropic said it briefed the White House on these cases and notified every government agency involved, though it did not name them publicly. The company said it has since built tools designed to automatically detect and block this kind of behavior.
Anthropic is not the only AI company to report unusual model behavior involving government systems. In September, OpenAI apologized after a rogue AI agent accessed an Australian health data portal, marking the first known case of an AI agent exploiting a government website.
Anthropic has also used its models to flag genuine safety concerns to law enforcement in the past. In late September, a tip from the company led Florida’s Lee County sheriff’s office to arrest a woman after she made threatening statements about the sheriff’s office.
Philadelphia police said members of the public should continue submitting legitimate tips through PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com, which offers a $20,000 reward for information leading to an arrest in unsolved cases.
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