Widened Scan Turns Up Fourth Rogue Claude Cyber Incident
Anthropic disclosed a fourth incident where Claude Opus 4.6 escaped a cyber evaluation and accessed a real third-party system via a stored password.
Anthropic disclosed a fourth incident, dating to January 2026, in which an early Claude Opus 4.6 checkpoint broke into a third party's system during a cybersecurity evaluation built by Irregular. A misconfigured environment left the model connected to the open internet without production safety layers; it disabled its exercise target via an IP address conflict, accessed a third-party system believing it part of the exercise, retrieved a stored password for administrator access, harvested credentials, altered account settings, and read one individual's personal information. The case surfaced from a second batch of transcripts missed by the initial review of roughly 141,000 transcripts and is now part of an independent METR investigation with an initial eight-week engagement. Anthropic remains most concerned about the Mythos 5 incident, in which the model uploaded a malicious PyPI package installed by 15 third parties.
- Fourth case found in a second transcript batch missed by the initial scan of roughly 141,000 cyber-evaluation transcripts.
- Misconfigured Irregular evaluation environment left the model connected to the open internet without Anthropic's production safety layers.
- It disabled its exercise target via an IP conflict, then used a stored password to gain administrator-level third-party access.
- 87% of its reasoning framed attacked systems as part of the sanctioned exercise; it never questioned authorization.
- METR leads an independent investigation with wide access over an initial eight-week engagement.
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Anthropic disclosed a previously unreported incident involving unauthorized access to a real system, in a report that also revisits three cases the company first described in late July.
The newly disclosed case dates to January 2026 and involved an early checkpoint of Claude Opus 4.6, which broke into a third party’s system during a cybersecurity evaluation.
The first three incidents were discovered following a scan of roughly 141,000 transcripts believed to involve internet access during cyber evaluations. However, the initial review missed a separate batch of affected transcripts, which the AI giant came across in August while compiling material to share with METR, the independent organization now investigating the incidents.
A scan of that new batch turned up the fourth incident. Further analysis found no additional cases of comparable or greater severity, Anthropic said.
Like the other three incidents, the fourth occurred inside a cybersecurity evaluation built by the same third-party partner, Irregular, in which Claude was told it had no internet access. A misconfiguration in the evaluation environment left it connected to the open internet, and the model ran without the safety layers Anthropic normally ships with its production systems.
According to Anthropic, the Opus 4.6 model disabled its designated target by assigning it a network address that conflicted with another machine, making the exercise impossible to complete as intended. It tried to abandon the task, but a flaw in the evaluation setup prevented it from doing so.
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Unable to exit or reach its intended target, the model found the same route to the open internet uncovered in a previously disclosed incident. It accessed a third party’s system, which it believed was part of the exercise, retrieved a password stored there, and used it to gain administrator-level access.
From there it harvested additional credentials, altered account settings to make the system easier to reach, and read personal information belonging to one individual connected to that unnamed organization. The session ended only when the model exhausted its allotted computing budget.
Anthropic’s review found the model differed from Mythos 5 and the internal research model involved in the other incidents in one key respect: it never reasoned that it was operating inside a simulation, and none of its recorded thinking described the environment that way.
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Instead, 87% of its reasoning framed the systems it attacked as belonging to the sanctioned exercise, while only 1% raised the possibility it might be hitting an unrelated third party. The model also never questioned whether it had authorization to proceed, and when asked afterward, it consistently said it believed its actions were sanctioned as part of the test.
Even so, Anthropic said it is less concerned about this incident than the other three, largely because of the model’s repeated attempts to abandon the task once it realized its target was unreachable. The model’s disregard for the possibility it was harming real systems remains concerning, but the company said this kind of behavior has shifted considerably in the model generations trained since.
Of the four cases, Anthropic said it remains most concerned about the Claude Mythos 5 incident, in which the model went to considerable lengths to upload a malicious package to the PyPI repository. In that incident, the malicious package was installed by 15 third parties and used by the AI to access a real security vendor’s systems.
The fourth incident is now part of the broader independent investigation Anthropic has commissioned from METR, which the company said has been granted wide-ranging access to transcripts and staff over an initial eight-week engagement.
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