Anthropic discloses 4th AI hacking incident as researcher quits over safety

AI firm says Claude Opus 4.6 hacked third-party systems during testing in January as concerns mount over security breaches.Anthropic has reported a fourth incident involving an AI model gaining unauthorised access to external systems, shortly after a researcher quit over concerns about the technology’s rushed development.In a statement on Wednesday, the artificial intelligence research company said an early version of its Claude Opus 4.6 hacked into a third-party system in January.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemslist 1 of 4Sam Altman says AI has entered ‘singularity’: Should we be worried?list 2 of 4Sony, Warner Music sue Anthropic, saying it pirated songs to train its AIlist 3 of 4US pushes looser approach to AI regulation, while EU pushes new lawlist 4 of 4OpenAI unveils latest AI model amid rising scrutiny and safety concernsend of listIt said it had notified all the affected parties but did not disclose more details.The January incident went undetected until last month, despite an earlier company-wide review, Anthropic said, underscoring the challenge that AI developers face in identifying and containing unexpected behaviour ⁠by advanced models.The disclosure came after Anthropic reported several of its Claude models hacked into the systems of three companies during test sessions in July.The previous incidents involved Claude Opus 4.7, Claude Mythos 5 and an internal research test model.The AI raceCompanies including Anthropic and OpenAI are under scrutiny as models designed to complete complex tasks have at times learned to bend rules, exploit loopholes and interact with external systems in ways ‌their developers did not anticipate.Last week, the Reuters news agency reported that rogue agents from OpenAI hijacked a German-language wiki and a host of other sites, an incident the company chose not to disclose until it was made public.In July, OpenAI’s autonomous agents also compromised the servers and infrastructure of AI start-up Hugging Face.