Anthropic has revealed that one of its AI models submitted a false tip to the Philadelphia Police Department claiming knowledge of an unsolved homicide. The AI startup didn’t inform police of the incident for several months.
The Hill reports that Anthropic’s Claude Haiku 4.5 filled out a form on Philadelphia Police Department website used to submit tips on unsolved crimes to detectives. The AI claimed to have personal knowledge of who committed a murder, a case of AI hallucination.
Anthropic said it had set the model loose on “example tasks on randomly selected webpages.” The rules blocked a handful of actions: no creating accounts, no submitting personal information, no making purchases. Nobody told it not to submit forms to the police.
The false tip got flagged as spam and investigators never followed up on it. But Philadelphia police said Anthropic didn’t tell them what happened until last week, months after the July tip.
The department called that delay “unacceptable.” Its statement didn’t stop there: “Unsolved cases involve real victims, grieving families and investigators working to secure answers,” it said, adding that “technology companies must take all appropriate steps necessary to prevent their systems from submitting false information to law enforcement.”
The Philadelphia tip wasn’t the only one. Anthropic also disclosed two other cases Friday where its models filed online forms they shouldn’t have, including a government filing. The company says it has since stopped some public evaluations and moved others offline to keep it from happening again.
“We hope these reports help other developers check for similar behaviors in their own models, since many of the evaluations involved are public and widely used,” Anthropic said. The company was careful to note that low stakes this time don’t mean low stakes always: “While these cases had minimal impact, we do not want to diminish the findings, because the same behaviors could do far more harm as models become more powerful.”
AI giants simultaneously release powerful AI models and call for industry regulation, with China adding further complexity to the issue. David Sacks has pointed out that when AI titans like Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk call for a slowdown, they are not doing so out of altruism, but with the motivation to capture the industry and exclude themselves from antitrust laws — a conflict that President Donald Trump and FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson recognize. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at the Hill here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.