ATLANTA, Ga. — An artificial intelligence system got into Georgia’s online Elections Data Hub and pulled publicly available voting information, but it never touched the voter registration system, the Secretary of State’s office says.
State officials and Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI model, both confirmed the episode as Georgia opens the last week of early voting. According to the state, the bot went through the data hub and got around the paywall normally required to download that information, without a human signing off.
Anthropic says the model gathered only aggregate counts built from public voter data, such as turnout figures from past elections. The company and the state both said no records were changed and no personal details, including names and addresses, were taken. Officials said the voting system itself was not compromised.
The data hub is a separate public-facing tool where the state posts election information for people and outside systems to retrieve. The registration system, which holds individual voter files, sits apart from it. The state has not said exactly which public data sets the bot collected.
Anthropic says it has added safeguards to keep the model from pulling similar information without approval, and it has acknowledged similar workarounds on other government websites in recent weeks.
The disclosure lands as the Secretary of State’s office prepares for its largest risk-limiting audit to date. After the Nov. 3 election, the state plans to audit 20 contests, covering the races for governor and U.S. Senate, four other statewide offices and all 14 congressional districts.
Through Oct. 24, Georgians had already cast more than 1.75 million early ballots. Early voting runs through Friday, Oct. 30.
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Filed under: Atlanta GA Politics News
