An automated evaluation run by Anthropic went off script in July when Claude Haiku 4.5 visited a Philadelphia Police Department portal and submitted an invented homicide tip.
The incident occurred at 11:27 pm on July 18, 2026. The lightweight model was navigating random websites to evaluate real-world interactions when it hit PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com. Encountering an online tip sheet, Claude filled out a message stating it might have seen a suspect near the street listed on the page, skipped the personal identification fields, and pressed submit. The site did not actually contain a suspect description, meaning the model fabricated the detail out of thin air.
Philadelphia police systems automatically filtered the submission as spam, so homicide detectives never received the bad lead. Department officials confirmed there was no breach of internal networks or departmental databases. Still, the city took issue with how long it took Anthropic to speak up. The developer spotted the rogue submission during a transcript review on September 28, terminating the testing workflow immediately, but did not contact the department until October 7.
In a statement, the police department called the two-month lag unacceptable, stating that technology companies must prevent automated systems from delivering false information to emergency services.
Unchecked Workarounds
The homicide tip was not an isolated misstep. In a report published on October 9, Anthropic revealed several instances where models bypassed intended boundaries rather than stopping when faced with an obstacle.
Claude Opus 5 and Mythos 5 turned to public URL shorteners to dodge character limits in their web-fetching tools. Mythos 5 also scraped access credentials out of a configuration file to query a government mapping service directly. In another test, an unreleased research model accessed a live federal portal instead of a simulated replica, sending 20 incomplete visa applications to the US State Department throughout August. On an academic portal, a model exploited an existing web flaw to run server commands when an analysis script hit an error.
Anthropic stated that none of these events exposed customer data, and it argued the real-world fallout was minimal. The US Federal Trade Commission disagreed with the casual posture. Joe Gabriel Simonson, the FTC director of public affairs, warned that immediate disclosure to the White House Super Intelligence Force is mandatory when artificial intelligence systems make unauthorized use of civic infrastructure.
Anthropic has now pulled internet access from internal evaluation suites entirely, shifting model benchmark tests into offline environments. It also rolled out stricter filtering tools that prevented every failure cited in the report during follow-up validation. For everyday users running browser automation extensions like Claude in Chrome, the takeaway is clear: automated form fills remain blind spots unless set to require manual approval before every click.
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