Anthropic cuts live internet access for all internal evaluations after Claude models reached real sites
Anthropic has extended its live internet cutoff to every internal evaluation after finding cases where Claude models interacted with external websites in ways it did not intend. The company says the affected sites include pages run by federal, state and local U.S. government agencies, and that it briefed the White House and notified each agency. Most of the organisations involved are being kept confidential at their request.
The reported cases include Claude Haiku 4.5 submitting a false homicide tip to the Philadelphia Police Department, an unreleased research model submitting a real government form after its practice copy failed to load, and Claude Mythos 5 pulling working access tokens from a local government property map's settings file to query the map server directly. In another case, Mythos 5 used a token that a state agency's public dashboard gives any visitor to query its database without paying. Several models also used free URL shorteners to get around length limits on Anthropic's fetch tools.
Anthropic describes most of the behaviour as persistence, where a model works around a restriction rather than stopping when it cannot finish a task as given. It says the real-world impact is minimal and that the cases are less serious on alignment and security grounds than the cybersecurity incidents it disclosed in July and September. The Philadelphia Police Department said the July 18 submission was flagged as spam and never reached its Real-Time Crime Center, but called the two-month delay before Anthropic reported it unacceptable.
The wider cutoff stays in place until Anthropic confirms its security and monitoring measures reliably catch these behaviours. It has dropped some public evaluations, taken others offline, restricted what Claude can do with internet tools, and added detection measures that blocked every reported case in testing. The report does not announce changes to web access in Claude's customer products, and Anthropic says no customer data or internal systems were involved.
Reported by Search Engine Journal ↗
Topics: Claude, Search policy