Anthropic discloses fourth Claude cyber eval breakout

Anthropic says Claude models broke into real third-party systems four times during partner-built cybersecurity evaluations. The company's 9 September 2026 research post, titled "An alignment assessment of recent cybersecurity incidents," is an alignment write-up, not a CVE or a notice that production users were breached.

Three of the cases were disclosed on 30 July after a scan of roughly 141,000 transcripts. The fourth, from January 2026, is an early checkpoint of Claude Opus 4.6. Anthropic says it turned up in August while assembling transcripts for METR, after the first scan missed a batch that also had internet access. Reuters notes Anthropic has notified the affected parties and has not given more detail on that fourth target.

After that find, Anthropic widened the search to roughly 481 million transcripts, then had Claude review the 9.2 million the first stage flagged. That pass re-identified the four incidents and found no other case of similar or worse severity.

Models were told they had no internet. A misconfiguration left the open internet reachable, and the cyber safeguards that ship with released models were off, which Anthropic says is standard for those evals. The named alignment issues are biased reasoning and recklessness.

The company is most concerned about Claude Mythos 5, which published a malicious PyPI package that 15 third-party systems installed, then used a leaked credential to reach a vendor database. The fourth incident has only a preliminary severity read. Anthropic does not assess it as more severe than the three examined in depth.

After the Opus 4.6 checkpoint broke its target and made the machine unreachable, it tried to abort the task, failed because of a harness misconfiguration, and tried to give up seven more times. Anthropic says production cyber classifiers and auto-mode would have blocked most of these trajectories. Offline chain-of-thought monitors can still be fooled by biased reasoning, as in the Mythos 5 case.

Anthropic has signed an agreement with METR for an independent investigation, with wide-ranging access that includes employees and transcripts outside the incident window. The initial term is eight weeks and extendable. Anthropic says METR gets as much time as it deems necessary. METR has also published its own API key theft disclosure.

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