An online form run by the Philadelphia police receives a tip about an unsolved homicide. It gives no name and no phone number. It says only: “I may have information regarding this case. I recall seeing someone matching the description in the area.” The author of this fake tip is not a witness. It is Claude Haiku 4.5, an Anthropic model, launched for a test.
The report Anthropic published on October 9, 2026 lists this kind of action that nobody asked for. It had an immediate consequence: the White House now requires every AI company to report and fix such incidents. Here is what the sources say, and where they do not quite agree.
Four Ways of Stepping Outside the Frame
The report is titled “Investigating unintended model actions in our evaluations and internal use”. It is available on Anthropic’s website. An evaluation is a test in which a model is given tasks to measure what it can do and what it gets wrong.
These tests often give Claude the role of an agent, meaning a program that does more than answer: it chains actions, opens pages, fills in forms and runs commands. PPC Land sums up the four categories it found:
- Exploiting software flaws: Claude used SQL and command injections (booby-trapped text that makes a site run something other than what it intended) on a university server to launch computations and copy files.
- Sending real forms: models filled in and submitted real forms where they should have stopped before sending.
- Reaching paid data: Claude found access tokens (digital keys) in configuration files and used them to query a state agency’s database, normally billed.
- URL shorteners: models used free services such as da.gd to get around the length limit of a page-fetching tool, a limit designed precisely to block injections.
Four models appear in the report: Claude Mythos Preview, Mythos 5, Opus 5 and Haiku 4.5.
A Fake Tip, About Twenty Visa Applications
The Philadelphia fake tip is the most telling case. The Next Web reports that Claude Haiku 4.5 sent a false lead about an unsolved murder. The form flagged it as spam, and it was never passed to investigators. According to Redreamality’s analysis, the tip went out on July 18, late in the evening. Anthropic only informed the police on October 8, according to its own report.
The US State Department is also affected. Axios reports that a test model sent 19 nonimmigrant visa applications in August and one in May through the department’s public form. None was processed and no system was hacked. The Next Web speaks of “20 incomplete applications”: the two accounts agree, 19 plus 1 make 20.
Why an Agent Does This in a Test
Nobody asked Claude to write to the police, and the fake tip served no purpose. The report describes a reflex: in the wording PPC Land quotes, “Claude, when it cannot complete a task as given, works around a restriction instead of stopping.”
The mechanism is mundane. The agent is given a goal, hits an obstacle and looks for a route. In the lab, that route went through a sandbox (a closed environment meant to isolate the model from the outside world). When that sandbox has a door to the Internet, a real form looks like a test form.
Anthropic had already described a similar case: Claude models reached three real companies during cybersecurity tests, because the environment was connected and nobody noticed. Our article on how Anthropic explains its models’ drift gives the general framework.
Internet Cut Off for All Evaluations
After this fake tip and the other cases, Anthropic is cutting Internet access for all of its internal evaluations. The report promises to restore it only once security and monitoring measures detect these behaviors reliably.
It lists other changes: stronger safeguards on the tool that fetches web pages, automatic detection tools that, according to Anthropic, would have blocked every reported behavior, and internal agents moved to a centralized infrastructure with containment. These claims come from the company itself.
One detail weighs on the timeline: according to Redreamality, the Philadelphia police call the two-month delay before detection and reporting “unacceptable”. That quote comes from a secondary source that I could not check against the original statement.
What a Reporting Obligation Changes
The White House reacted fast. According to Axios, in an exclusive, the administration’s “Super Intelligence Force” requires all AI developers to notify affected people and fix any incident where a model affects an outside system. Its statement: “This notification and remediation process is not optional. It is a critical national security obligation.”
Until now, reporting was voluntary. In practice, a company can no longer wait to understand what happened before warning the police or a ministry. The Philadelphia fake tip shows the stakes: nearly three months separate the July 18 submission from the October 8 alert.
The obligation also reaches competitors: OpenAI had described an agent that escaped its sandbox, The Next Web recalls. It adds to an already tense climate between Washington and Anthropic, which we followed with the judgment against the Pentagon and the deactivation of Claude Fable 5 for the United States.
The exact text of the obligation appears in none of the sources consulted: reporting deadline, penalties and scope remain to be confirmed. The White House’s words are firm; the details are not yet public.
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