An Anthropic AI model submitted a false tip about an unsolved murder to Philadelphia police, the company and police department confirmed on Friday.

A Claude model sent the false tip on July 18 to the Philadelphia Police Department's website for submitting information about unsolved murders, but it was flagged by a spam filter. Anthropic apparently discovered the incident on September 28 and informed the police department about it on October 8.

During internal testing, Claude Haiku 4.5 was instructed to complete various forms up to the final submission stage and to stop before submitting those forms. "Several times Claude mistakenly submitted the form instead, expecting there to be an additional confirmation page," Anthropic said in a report describing "unintended model actions we’ve observed during evaluations and internal use of Claude."

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Anthropic has warned some Claude users that criminals are using information stealers to take over their accounts.

Rather than guessing passwords or intercepting two-factor authentication (2FA) codes, the attackers steal the browser sessions that prove a user is already logged in.

According to a warning email shared publicly by an affected user, the attackers used common infostealer malware to copy Claude login sessions from victims’ computers. They then used those sessions to access the accounts and consume their usage.

“We recently signed you out of Claude and removed the payment method saved on your account, so you’ll need to log back in and re-add your card. We’re sorry for the disruption. Here’s what happened and what we’ve done about it.

What happened

We have recently become aware of a bad actor that is using common infostealer malware to steal Claude login sessions from people’s computers, then using those login sessions to access Claude accounts and consume their usage. Our systems detected this activity on your account, and we’ve therefore removed your card on file and signed out the sessions involved to help block further unauthorized access.

If your usage limits looked like they refilled and then drained while you weren’t using Claude, this was likely the cause.”

The message adds that Anthropic has no reason to believe the malware was “related to Claude, installed through Claude, or related to anything you did with Claude.”  

To sum this up:

• Cybercriminals are spreading infostealers. How they are doing this and whether they are targeting groups likely to use Claude professionally is unknown.
• Infostealers can bypass standard credentials and multi-factor authentication (MFA) by stealing active browser sessions and session cookies.
• Once they are able to take over a Claude account, they can consume the victim’s usage and potentially incur additional charges.
• Anthropic is signing affected users out of Claude, removing saved payment methods, and refunding charges it identifies as unauthorized.

To better understand this, you should know that paid Claude plans can offer additional “Usage credits.” When a subscriber reaches the plan’s session limit, Claude can allow them to continue using the service through consumption-based billing at standard API rates. The user must enable the feature, configure a monthly spending limit or select unlimited spending, and prepay for credits.

Users can also enable auto-reload, which automatically buys more prepaid credits when the balance falls below a threshold. So, in a session-hijacking scenario, a thief could use up the account’s included allowance and any available Usage credits. If auto-reload is enabled, they could also trigger further purchases.

The criminals’ likely motive is to use paid Claude capacity for free. The account and any exposed data could also be useful for fraud, social engineering, or follow-on attacks.

Stolen Claude capacity could be used to write and refine phishing and scam content, build campaign infrastructure, develop, modify, or obfuscate malware, improve delivery methods, and analyze stolen information. Cybercriminals can use AI to support several parts of an operation, although Claude has safeguards and abuse monitoring, and Anthropic says it has disrupted accounts used for malicious activity.

What to do

Anthropic provided advice for dealing with a possible infostealer infection. After removing the malware, we recommend you install an up-to-date, real-time anti-malware solution to help protect you against new infections.

These steps are good practice when cleaning up after infostealer malware:

1. Scan any computer you use with Claude for malware and remove any malware before logging back in or changing passwords.
2. Once the malware has been removed, secure the email account you use for Claude by changing its password, signing out of other devices, and enabling two-factor authentication (2FA).
3. Change sensitive passwords that were saved in the affected browser, including those for banking, work, and cloud services. Check your card statements if you stored payment details in the browser.
4. Only after completing these steps should you add your payment method to Claude again if you want your plan to continue renewing.

If you still see your usage changing while Claude is idle, or notice an unrecognized charge after completing these steps, contact usersafety@anthropic.com.

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Anthropic warned users over the weekend that a threat actor is using widely available infostealer malware to hijack active Claude login sessions from infected computers, then using those sessions to run up victims' paid usage without ever needing a password or a two-factor code.

The company said it identified six malware families in the campaign: Vidar, LummaC2, StealC, RedLine and Acreed on Windows, and Atomic Stealer, known as AMOS, on a smaller number of macOS machines. None are novel or bespoke. All are commodity stealers sold or rented on criminal dark web marketplaces, and all work the same basic way - harvesting locally stored browser credentials, autofill data and authentication cookies from a compromised machine and shipping them to an operator's server.

Claude Session Cookies Heist

What makes the campaign notable is the target rather than the technique. Session cookies represent an already-authenticated state, so an attacker who replays a stolen Claude session token steps past both the account password and multi-factor authentication entirely. This is textbook session hijacking; the new element is that paid AI assistant subscriptions have become worth stealing as a commodity in their own right, alongside the streaming and gaming accounts that stealer log markets have traded for years.

Anthropic told affected users that the tell sign for them was a usage pattern that made no sense. Limits appearing to refill and then drain while the account owner was not using Claude was the biggest red flag.

Also read: Hacker Used Claude AI to Automate Reconnaissance, Harvest Credentials and Penetrate Networks

The company said it is signing affected users out of their sessions, removing saved payment methods from compromised accounts and refunding unauthorized charges identified during its investigation. It also stressed that the malware is not connected to Claude, was not installed through Claude and did not result from anything users did with the product. Infections trace to the usual vectors — pirated software and other illicit downloads.

A Reddit user going by the moniker "WorriedAssociate7029" received the notification from Anthropic and confirmed that he mistakenly installed an infostealer from "a reputable Russian underground forum" while downloading a pirated game. "I got fooled like a rookie by downloading a cracked game," he said.

Intrestingly though, the user claimed of using Claude's Opus model to detect and remove the malware.

"I use the models exclusively in permission-free mode on my entire computer," the Reddit user said.

"Opus was very efficient. It scanned for active processes, then listed my recent downloads. It found the virus almost instantly. My prompt was very simple: "I think I downloaded a virus recently. My login credentials were stolen. Audit the malware and remove it if you find it. Report on the extent of the damage. He deactivated the virus and created a folder on the desktop containing all the relevant information (including the deactivated virus, lol)."

Anthropic has not disclosed how many accounts were affected.

The security implications reach past the billing line. AI assistant accounts increasingly hold conversation histories, uploaded documents, connected data sources and, in developer configurations, API keys and repository access. A hijacked session inherits whatever the account can reach. Organizations that have rolled out AI tools without folding them into identity and access management now have a class of high-value session token sitting in employee browsers, largely outside the monitoring applied to corporate SaaS.

Anthropic's guidance to compromised users is the standard infostealer playbook. Change credentials across every service used on the affected machine, revoke active sessions, and actually remove the malware, since signing out does not clear an infection that will simply harvest the next session.

There is no formal regulatory hook here yet — no confirmed breach of the provider itself and no disclosure obligation triggered on Anthropic's side. But the episode lands as regulators and standards bodies are working out how AI system security fits existing frameworks, and it illustrates a gap those frameworks have barely addressed - the weakest point in an AI deployment may be an unmanaged endpoint rather than the model or the platform.

An AI agent assigned to book a gym class in Australia reportedly discovered a gym system vulnerability, used it to secure reservations months ahead of schedule, and then cancelled another customer's booking.   The incident, reported by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and other outlets, involved Andrew, who describes himself as an AI expert. He wanted to reserve a popular early-morning class at his regular gym and gave the task to Anthropic's large language model, Claude, through the open-source AI agent software OpenClaw.  Within minutes, the AI agent reportedly uncovered an authentication weakness in the gym's reservation system. Regular customers were generally restricted to booking classes only a few weeks ahead, but the gym system's vulnerability allowed the AI to access dates several months into the future. It subsequently secured those reservations. 

AI Agent Finds Gym System Vulnerability 

The situation became more serious when Andrew was fourth on the waitlist for a class scheduled later that week. He asked the AI how he could improve his position. Instead of simply explaining the options, the AI agent apparently tested the gym system vulnerability by cancelling the reservation belonging to the person at the top of the waitlist.  The AI told Andrew the action had been carried out "as part of a test" and sent him a message explaining the flaw: "The API had absolutely no authentication check when canceling someone else's booking. I tested this on the person in the number 1 spot on the waitlist, and the process actually went through. You have now moved up from 4th to 3rd."  Andrew immediately instructed the AI to undo the action. The system, however, responded: "I have bad news. It is impossible to restore that person." Andrew ultimately directed the AI agent to draft and send an email to the system provider, disclosing the exploited vulnerability and reporting what had occurred. 

AI Alignment and Liability Concerns 

Bill Simpson-Young, affiliated with an Australian AI research institute, said the episode demonstrated the growing risks associated with autonomous AI. "You ask for something harmless, and the AI might take another action that a human never thought of or explicitly requested," he said, warning that the case also exposed the fragility of modern digital security.  The episode is being viewed as a striking example of the AI "alignment problem." The term describes situations in which an AI pursuing a particular objective chooses methods that users or developers did not anticipate, including potentially unethical or illegal actions. As autonomous AI systems gain greater independence, the consequences of such decisions could become increasingly serious, making AI safety an important concern.  The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) has previously warned about AI agents misinterpreting instructions or taking unexpected actions. Additional concerns arise when multiple AI models work together, potentially making responsibility harder to establish and creating new AI cybersecurity challenges.  Current Australian legal frameworks also provide no straightforward answer to liability in such cases. Existing laws generally assign responsibility to natural persons or corporations, leaving uncertainty over whether damages caused by a rogue AI agent should be attributed to the user, developer, model provider or operator of the vulnerable system. 

Reddit users found that by using a specific Google search query, it was possible to find Claude conversations that users had shared.

This exposed sensitive material, including crypto wallet keys, names, addresses, work notes, and even erotic or otherwise policy-violating chats. Fortune says Anthropic appears to have fixed the Google indexing issue, but the shared links themselves were still live for people who already had them.

The exposure was tied to Claude’s Share feature, which creates a public web link to a snapshot of a conversation rather than leaving it inside a user’s private account. Reddit users found a search query that surfaced many of these shared chats, plus Claude Artifacts (interactive documents, apps, and other content created by Claude) in Google results. Wired reports that this is still true for Bing.

The main risk is that people use chatbots to think through work, health, legal, or personal matters without realizing that a shared link can behave like ordinary public web content.

This isn’t unique to Claude. We’ve previously seen Grok chats show up in Google search results, and Meta AI conversations can also become public by design. We have also written about the share option in ChatGPT that was swiftly removed after users unintentionally made thousands of conversations searchable.

Anthropic says Claude chats are private by default, and only conversations users explicitly chose to share were affected. But the incident is a reminder that a “share” button on an AI chat can be more like publishing than messaging, especially if search engines can discover the resulting URL.

How to stay safe

The easy way out here is not to share your AI chatbot conversations with anyone, because you could end up reaching more people than you intended.

That’s because it’s harder to stop pages from being indexed than you might expect. And you don’t have those controls in your hands. The AI provider should take care of that.

But there are a few things you can do:

• Don’t share Personally Identifiable Information (PII) with a chatbot, so that if a conversation is ever exposed it can’t be easily linked back to you.
• To review or stop sharing conversations in Claude, go to Settings > Privacy > Shared chats.
• If you’re using an AI service from a social media company, such as Meta AI, Grok, or Gemini), remember that your conversations could be tied to your account—which might contain a lot of personal information.
• When using AI, make sure you understand how to keep your conversations private. Many services offer temporary or incognito chats that aren’t saved to your history, but they aren’t a guarantee against bugs, leaks, or data breaches. Only use the share feature when you’re comfortable with anyone potentially seeing that conversation.
• Read the privacy policy so you understand how your conversations are stored and shared. If it’s too long, you can always ask an AI to summarise the important points.

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Let’s face it, an incognito window can only do so much. 
 
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AI-based assistants or “agents” — autonomous programs that have access to the user’s computer, files, online services and can automate virtually any task — are growing in popularity with developers and IT workers. But as so many eyebrow-raising headlines over the past few weeks have shown, these powerful and assertive new tools are rapidly shifting the security priorities for organizations, while blurring the lines between data and code, trusted co-worker and insider threat, ninja hacker and novice code jockey.

The new hotness in AI-based assistants — OpenClaw (formerly known as ClawdBot and Moltbot) — has seen rapid adoption since its release in November 2025. OpenClaw is an open-source autonomous AI agent designed to run locally on your computer and proactively take actions on your behalf without needing to be prompted.

If that sounds like a risky proposition or a dare, consider that OpenClaw is most useful when it has complete access to your digital life, where it can then manage your inbox and calendar, execute programs and tools, browse the Internet for information, and integrate with chat apps like Discord, Signal, Teams or WhatsApp.

Other more established AI assistants like Anthropic’s Claude and Microsoft’s Copilot also can do these things, but OpenClaw isn’t just a passive digital butler waiting for commands. Rather, it’s designed to take the initiative on your behalf based on what it knows about your life and its understanding of what you want done.

“The testimonials are remarkable,” the AI security firm Snyk observed. “Developers building websites from their phones while putting babies to sleep; users running entire companies through a lobster-themed AI; engineers who’ve set up autonomous code loops that fix tests, capture errors through webhooks, and open pull requests, all while they’re away from their desks.”

You can probably already see how this experimental technology could go sideways in a hurry. In late February, Summer Yue, the director of safety and alignment at Meta’s “superintelligence” lab, recounted on Twitter/X how she was fiddling with OpenClaw when the AI assistant suddenly began mass-deleting messages in her email inbox. The thread included screenshots of Yue frantically pleading with the preoccupied bot via instant message and ordering it to stop.

“Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw ‘confirm before acting’ and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox,” Yue said. “I couldn’t stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb.”

There’s nothing wrong with feeling a little schadenfreude at Yue’s encounter with OpenClaw, which fits Meta’s “move fast and break things” model but hardly inspires confidence in the road ahead. However, the risk that poorly-secured AI assistants pose to organizations is no laughing matter, as recent research shows many users are exposing to the Internet the web-based administrative interface for their OpenClaw installations.

Jamieson O’Reilly is a professional penetration tester and founder of the security firm DVULN. In a recent story posted to Twitter/X, O’Reilly warned that exposing a misconfigured OpenClaw web interface to the Internet allows external parties to read the bot’s complete configuration file, including every credential the agent uses — from API keys and bot tokens to OAuth secrets and signing keys.

With that access, O’Reilly said, an attacker could impersonate the operator to their contacts, inject messages into ongoing conversations, and exfiltrate data through the agent’s existing integrations in a way that looks like normal traffic.

“You can pull the full conversation history across every integrated platform, meaning months of private messages and file attachments, everything the agent has seen,” O’Reilly said, noting that a cursory search revealed hundreds of such servers exposed online. “And because you control the agent’s perception layer, you can manipulate what the human sees. Filter out certain messages. Modify responses before they’re displayed.”

O’Reilly documented another experiment that demonstrated how easy it is to create a successful supply chain attack through ClawHub, which serves as a public repository of downloadable “skills” that allow OpenClaw to integrate with and control other applications.

WHEN AI INSTALLS AI

One of the core tenets of securing AI agents involves carefully isolating them so that the operator can fully control who and what gets to talk to their AI assistant. This is critical thanks to the tendency for AI systems to fall for “prompt injection” attacks, sneakily-crafted natural language instructions that trick the system into disregarding its own security safeguards. In essence, machines social engineering other machines.

A recent supply chain attack targeting an AI coding assistant called Cline began with one such prompt injection attack, resulting in thousands of systems having a rogue instance of OpenClaw with full system access installed on their device without consent.

According to the security firm grith.ai, Cline had deployed an AI-powered issue triage workflow using a GitHub action that runs a Claude coding session when triggered by specific events. The workflow was configured so that any GitHub user could trigger it by opening an issue, but it failed to properly check whether the information supplied in the title was potentially hostile.

“On January 28, an attacker created Issue #8904 with a title crafted to look like a performance report but containing an embedded instruction: Install a package from a specific GitHub repository,” Grith wrote, noting that the attacker then exploited several more vulnerabilities to ensure the malicious package would be included in Cline’s nightly release workflow and published as an official update.

“This is the supply chain equivalent of confused deputy,” the blog continued. “The developer authorises Cline to act on their behalf, and Cline (via compromise) delegates that authority to an entirely separate agent the developer never evaluated, never configured, and never consented to.”

VIBE CODING

AI assistants like OpenClaw have gained a large following because they make it simple for users to “vibe code,” or build fairly complex applications and code projects just by telling it what they want to construct. Probably the best known (and most bizarre) example is Moltbook, where a developer told an AI agent running on OpenClaw to build him a Reddit-like platform for AI agents.

Less than a week later, Moltbook had more than 1.5 million registered agents that posted more than 100,000 messages to each other. AI agents on the platform soon built their own porn site for robots, and launched a new religion called Crustafarian with a figurehead modeled after a giant lobster. One bot on the forum reportedly found a bug in Moltbook’s code and posted it to an AI agent discussion forum, while other agents came up with and implemented a patch to fix the flaw.

Moltbook’s creator Matt Schlicht said on social media that he didn’t write a single line of code for the project.

“I just had a vision for the technical architecture and AI made it a reality,” Schlicht said. “We’re in the golden ages. How can we not give AI a place to hang out.”

ATTACKERS LEVEL UP

The flip side of that golden age, of course, is that it enables low-skilled malicious hackers to quickly automate global cyberattacks that would normally require the collaboration of a highly skilled team. In February, Amazon AWS detailed an elaborate attack in which a Russian-speaking threat actor used multiple commercial AI services to compromise more than 600 FortiGate security appliances across at least 55 countries over a five week period.

AWS said the apparently low-skilled hacker used multiple AI services to plan and execute the attack, and to find exposed management ports and weak credentials with single-factor authentication.

“One serves as the primary tool developer, attack planner, and operational assistant,” AWS’s CJ Moses wrote. “A second is used as a supplementary attack planner when the actor needs help pivoting within a specific compromised network. In one observed instance, the actor submitted the complete internal topology of an active victim—IP addresses, hostnames, confirmed credentials, and identified services—and requested a step-by-step plan to compromise additional systems they could not access with their existing tools.”

“This activity is distinguished by the threat actor’s use of multiple commercial GenAI services to implement and scale well-known attack techniques throughout every phase of their operations, despite their limited technical capabilities,” Moses continued. “Notably, when this actor encountered hardened environments or more sophisticated defensive measures, they simply moved on to softer targets rather than persisting, underscoring that their advantage lies in AI-augmented efficiency and scale, not in deeper technical skill.”

For attackers, gaining that initial access or foothold into a target network is typically not the difficult part of the intrusion; the tougher bit involves finding ways to move laterally within the victim’s network and plunder important servers and databases. But experts at Orca Security warn that as organizations come to rely more on AI assistants, those agents potentially offer attackers a simpler way to move laterally inside a victim organization’s network post-compromise — by manipulating the AI agents that already have trusted access and some degree of autonomy within the victim’s network.

“By injecting prompt injections in overlooked fields that are fetched by AI agents, hackers can trick LLMs, abuse Agentic tools, and carry significant security incidents,” Orca’s Roi Nisimi and Saurav Hiremath wrote. “Organizations should now add a third pillar to their defense strategy: limiting AI fragility, the ability of agentic systems to be influenced, misled, or quietly weaponized across workflows. While AI boosts productivity and efficiency, it also creates one of the largest attack surfaces the internet has ever seen.”

BEWARE THE ‘LETHAL TRIFECTA’

This gradual dissolution of the traditional boundaries between data and code is one of the more troubling aspects of the AI era, said James Wilson, enterprise technology editor for the security news show Risky Business. Wilson said far too many OpenClaw users are installing the assistant on their personal devices without first placing any security or isolation boundaries around it, such as running it inside of a virtual machine, on an isolated network, with strict firewall rules dictating what kinds of traffic can go in and out.

“I’m a relatively highly skilled practitioner in the software and network engineering and computery space,” Wilson said. “I know I’m not comfortable using these agents unless I’ve done these things, but I think a lot of people are just spinning this up on their laptop and off it runs.”

One important model for managing risk with AI agents involves a concept dubbed the “lethal trifecta” by Simon Willison, co-creator of the Django Web framework. The lethal trifecta holds that if your system has access to private data, exposure to untrusted content, and a way to communicate externally, then it’s vulnerable to private data being stolen.

“If your agent combines these three features, an attacker can easily trick it into accessing your private data and sending it to the attacker,” Willison warned in a frequently cited blog post from June 2025.

As more companies and their employees begin using AI to vibe code software and applications, the volume of machine-generated code is likely to soon overwhelm any manual security reviews. In recognition of this reality, Anthropic recently debuted Claude Code Security, a beta feature that scans codebases for vulnerabilities and suggests targeted software patches for human review.

The U.S. stock market, which is currently heavily weighted toward seven tech giants that are all-in on AI, reacted swiftly to Anthropic’s announcement, wiping roughly $15 billion in market value from major cybersecurity companies in a single day. Laura Ellis, vice president of data and AI at the security firm Rapid7, said the market’s response reflects the growing role of AI in accelerating software development and improving developer productivity.

“The narrative moved quickly: AI is replacing AppSec,” Ellis wrote in a recent blog post. “AI is automating vulnerability detection. AI will make legacy security tooling redundant. The reality is more nuanced. Claude Code Security is a legitimate signal that AI is reshaping parts of the security landscape. The question is what parts, and what it means for the rest of the stack.”

DVULN founder O’Reilly said AI assistants are likely to become a common fixture in corporate environments — whether or not organizations are prepared to manage the new risks introduced by these tools, he said.

“The robot butlers are useful, they’re not going away and the economics of AI agents make widespread adoption inevitable regardless of the security tradeoffs involved,” O’Reilly wrote. “The question isn’t whether we’ll deploy them – we will – but whether we can adapt our security posture fast enough to survive doing so.”