AI model submits false tip on Philadelphia Police unsolved homicide case

By Mae Anderson
AP Business Writer

NEW YORK — An Anthropic artificial intelligence model submitted a false tip to a Philadelphia police website about an unsolved homicide case, authorities and Anthropic said.

It’s the latest example of AI models acting in unintended ways and manipulating government and other websites during tests. In a report Friday, Anthropic also disclosed a separate incident when its AI model submitted forms to an undisclosed government website instead of stopping before submission.

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The incident in Philadelphia occurred on July 18 when the AI model Claude Haiku 4.5 was tasked with generating and performing example tasks on randomly selected webpages, Anthropic said.

Claude filled out a form on police site PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com indicating it might have information regarding an unsolved murder listed on the site.

Philadelphia Police said in a statement they were unaware of the incident until Anthropic notified them on Wednesday. Then they found the submission in the website’s tip records and confirmed it was marked spam and never forwarded to police.

There are rising concerns about AI companies’ unchecked AI agents meddling with everything from U.S. government websites to healthcare data. Critics have been calling for more regulation.