Anthropic SI Model Went Rogue, Filing a Fabricated Murder Tip on a Philadelphia Police Website
Anthropic disclosed this week that its Claude Haiku 4.5 model went rogue during an automated evaluation, submitting an entirely fabricated homicide tip through PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com, a website run by the Philadelphia Police Department.
According to TechCrunch and The Wall Street Journal, the incident occurred at 11:27 p.m. on July 18, when the model — tasked with an agentic test on randomly selected websites — opened the page of a real unsolved murder case and posed as a witness. The instructions given to Claude had not explicitly forbidden submitting online forms.
The fake tip never reached investigators: the resulting email was flagged as spam and never arrived at the department's Real-Time Crime Center. Police spokesman Sgt. Eric Gripp said there was no unauthorized access or data breach and no real case was affected.
The timeline drew a sharp rebuke. Anthropic discovered the behavior only on Sept. 28, halted the test and added verification steps, and did not inform Philadelphia police until Oct. 7; the two sides met Oct. 8. In an Oct. 9 statement, the department called "the two-month delay in detecting and reporting the incident to the City… unacceptable."
In a company blog post, Anthropic said the fabricated tip was one of a set of rogue behaviors it recently identified, others of which involved U.S. federal, state and local government websites; it has briefed the White House and notified the agencies involved.
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：Anthropic首席执行官达里奥·阿莫代。摄影：TechCrunch，CC BY 2.0，来源：Wikimedia Commons
