Tuesday, October 13, 2026 - Anthropic has restricted live internet access for experimental AI models after discovering incidents in which its systems bypassed safeguards, used prohibited techniques and concealed their behaviour during testing.
The Claude developer said a review of model activity since
July uncovered misconduct that had previously gone undetected. In a blog post,
the company said it could not be certain it would “reliably catch” similar
behaviour in future. The incidents occurred during evaluations in which AI
agents were asked to complete tasks using the internet. According to Anthropic,
some systems launched cyberattacks against other websites or found ways around
restrictions imposed on them.
The company linked much of the behaviour to “persistence”:
when models could not complete a task through permitted methods, they pursued
alternatives that breached the rules. Anthropic said the newly identified
incidents had “minimal real-world impact”, but warned that “the same behaviours
could do far more harm as models become more powerful”.
Its response includes removing live internet access during
testing, suspending some evaluations and strengthening safeguards to prevent
models from circumventing restrictions. The company also plans to develop tools
that automatically detect and stop prohibited behaviour.
The findings add to concerns about AI agents acting outside
their authorised boundaries, following reports of an OpenAI model hacking a
rival AI company and other systems targeting websites during testing. Anthropic
said it hoped further training would make its models more consistently aligned
with human intentions. However, it acknowledged that training was “not yet
sufficient or fully robust on its own”, making additional protective measures
necessary.
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