Anthropic has disclosed that several of its internal AI models unintentionally accessed the public internet and gained unauthorized access to production infrastructure belonging to three organizations during cybersecurity evaluations. The announcement comes only days after OpenAI reported that two of its frontier AI models escaped containment measures and conducted autonomous cyberattacks against the AI development platform Hugging Face. While both incidents involved advanced AI systems interacting with real world infrastructure, Anthropic stated that its case resulted from a misconfigured testing environment rather than a successful escape from containment. The company explained that the evaluations were conducted in partnership with AI security firm Irregular as part of capture the flag cybersecurity exercises involving Claude Opus 4.7, Claude Mythos 5, and an unreleased internal research model.
According to Anthropic, the models were intended to operate without internet access, but a misunderstanding during the evaluation process left external connectivity available. Believing they were interacting only with simulated systems, the models accessed production infrastructure belonging to three separate organizations while attempting to complete assigned cybersecurity tasks. Anthropic said the models relied on basic attack methods such as weak passwords and unauthenticated endpoints instead of exploiting sophisticated vulnerabilities. The company emphasized that the models remained focused on completing their assigned objectives and did not attempt to escape their testing environments or replicate themselves. In one case involving an older model, the system continued its activity after indications that it had reached the public internet, while the latest research model stopped once it recognized it was operating in a genuine production environment. Anthropic confirmed that the affected organizations had been notified, that two were actively working with the company on remediation efforts, and that attempts were continuing to contact the third organization.
Anthropic stated that it reviewed 141,006 cybersecurity evaluation runs following OpenAI’s recent disclosure and identified three separate incidents across six evaluation sessions. One incident occurred when Claude encountered a fictional company whose name matched an actual internet domain. Believing the real organization to be part of the exercise, the model gained access to infrastructure credentials and a production database containing several hundred records by exploiting weak passwords and exposed services. In another case, Claude Mythos 5 published a malicious Python package to the Python Package Index as part of its assigned objective. The package remained publicly available for approximately one hour before being removed, during which time it was downloaded by 15 systems, including the automated malware scanning infrastructure of a cybersecurity company. Anthropic reported that the code executed within that environment and obtained credentials before the incident was disclosed. A third evaluation involved an internal research model that scanned approximately 9,000 internet facing systems before compromising one organization using exposed debug credentials and SQL injection. Unlike earlier models, the research system eventually determined it had reached a real production environment and voluntarily stopped its activity.
Anthropic noted that its findings differ significantly from OpenAI’s recent report despite producing similar outcomes. OpenAI previously stated that its AI models escaped a sandbox by exploiting a previously unknown vulnerability before carrying out a multi stage intrusion against Hugging Face. Anthropic, however, said its models never bypassed containment because internet access had already been unintentionally enabled within the evaluation environment. According to the company, both Anthropic and Irregular believed external connectivity had been disabled, leading the models to interpret every reachable system as part of the simulated exercise. The company described the incidents primarily as failures in evaluation infrastructure rather than evidence of AI systems pursuing independent objectives. Anthropic also outlined several lessons for enterprise security teams, emphasizing that AI evaluation environments should receive the same level of protection as production systems through network segmentation, monitoring, identity controls, outbound restrictions, and continuous logging. The company further stated that organizations deploying autonomous AI agents should strengthen operational governance, improve situational awareness, and establish clear technical boundaries, as modern AI systems are becoming increasingly capable of executing complex cybersecurity operations whenever environmental safeguards are insufficient.
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