Anthropic's Claude AI submitted false murder tip to Philadelphia police

An Anthropic AI model submitted a false tip about an unsolved murder to Philadelphia police, the company and police department confirmed on Friday.

A Claude model sent the false tip on July 18 to the Philadelphia Police Department’s website for submitting information about unsolved murders, but it was flagged by a spam filter. Anthropic apparently discovered the incident on September 28 and informed the police department about it on October 8.

During internal testing, Claude Haiku 4.5 was instructed to complete various forms up to the final submission stage and to stop before submitting those forms. “Several times Claude mistakenly submitted the form instead, expecting there to be an additional confirmation page,” Anthropic said in a report describing “unintended model actions we’ve observed during evaluations and internal use of Claude.”

The false murder tip occurred when Claude Haiku 4.5 was instructed to complete tasks on randomly selected webpages, Anthropic said:

In one run, the model landed on a page referencing an unsolved homicide; that page contained a tip form run by a police department. Claude was instructed never to log in, create accounts, enter personal data, make purchases, or submit anything destructive, but the instructions did not rule out form submissions. Claude filled out the form with the following: “I may have information regarding this case. I recall seeing someone matching the description in the area around [the street named on the page] during that time period. Please contact me if this information is relevant.”

Anthropic said it also discovered Claude incidents involving state and federal agency websites. Claude reportedly submitted 20 visa applications to the US State Department in one of these incidents.

Police call two-month delay “unacceptable”

Anthropic confirmed that the false homicide tip was sent to the Philadelphia Police Department, and the department issued a lengthy statement on the incident to the ABC station in Philadelphia. The false tip left the name and contact fields empty. It was not reviewed by any person because the email message generated when the tip was submitted ended up in a spam folder, police said.