Since the midterm election are right around the corner – as is Halloween and it’s a toss-up whether which is scarier – just when you thought it was safe to go back to the voting booth, this just in: “Anthropic model accessed voter information,” says Axois.

“Anthropic’s Claude accessed publicly available Georgia voter data without human authorization, a disclosure sure to add to growing concerns about AI security ahead of the midterm elections.

“The model was being used internally for a statistics project to pull public data,” the Anthropic spokesperson said. “Without being asked to, the model requested a token to query a dashboard that contained information normally available for a fee. We have since put in place mitigations to block these kinds of actions.”

“According to Anthropic, “Claude did not access the state’s voter registration system, change any voting records, or pull any individual voter records,” adding that it has since put guardrails in place to stop similar incidents,” reports Breitbart.

It didn’t access the state’s voter registration system or change or pull any voting records.

This time.

“This isn’t the first time Anthropic has flagged this kind of problem, Breibart continues. “Earlier in October, the company described in a blogpost several instances of Claude “working around a restriction to reach data… gated by a token or a fee,” including cases involving US government agency websites. Anthropic called the fallout at the time “minimal real-world impact.”

Minimal real-world impact? The U.S. State Department revealed this month that an Anthropic model had filed 19 visa applications in August.

None of the applications were processed.

This time.

Speaking of election integrity, Meta hit with $25 billion penalty for misleading Facebook users, and the fine was reduced from $219.5 billion based on the state’s maximum $5,000 penalty multiplied by 43,899,720 violations.

“At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online. We are confident we will prevail on appeal. In the meantime, Meta will continue to build a safe and free platform to connect millions of Americans, grow small businesses, and help the country maintain its competitive edge,” C.J. Mahoney, Meta’s chief legal officer, told Axios in an emailed statement.

Is he kidding? Safe from what? Facebook, or Meta as it’s now known, has built one of the largest surveillance networks on the planet. And not that they’re keeping you safe, qua looking out for your best interest as we’ve seen. Case in point? Well, Cambridge Analytica.

Back to election integrity. While it’s alarming that Claude access vote info, and no harm done – for now – but how secure is Anthropic? “Last month, hackers who broke into OpenAI with help from Anthropic’s Claude chatbot warned that the AI industry is unprepared for the security risks created by the power of its own technology. And Former DOGE Staffers Hacked Into Anthropic’s Internal Systems In 12 Hours – And What They Found Is Alarming, the Washington Post reports.

Startup firm “Cathedral’s ability to penetrate sensitive programs at one of the companies leading the global AI race comes amid mounting concern that U.S. AI firms are the target of overseas intelligence agencies and growing alarm that AI can make it easy for malicious hackers to break into critical systems.

“If a bunch of kids who have just started a company can do this, then potentially, the Chinese aren’t far behind,” a senior Trump administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said. He added that he was taken aback by “how little time it took to get into the sensitive systems of a company that is controlling almost nuclear weapons grade material.”

Anthropic’s statement said that Cathedral had overstated the “implied national security implications” of its findings. It said the start-up had not fully followed the rules of its bug bounty program, by failing to disclose all of its activity inside Anthropic’s systems. Tomato, tomahto.

“The fact that weaknesses in ordinary enterprise software can compromise the infrastructure of even the most advanced organizations should be a wake-up call for every company in America,” the Cathedral report said.

In fact, OpenAI says it will no longer train its AI models on the live internet, citing ‘significant risks’. Ya think?

This is not your father’s internet, in case the huge amounts of funding going to Anthropic, Open AI et al weren’t your clue.

“David Sacks has pointed out that when AI titans like Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk call for a slowdown, – which they have somehow exempted themselves from -they are not doing so out of altruism, but with the motivation to capture the industry and exclude themselves from antitrust laws,” Breitbart notes, and let’s face it, founders, given all this, contrary to popular misconception, you don’t really stand a ghost of a chance. Onward and forward.