AI Agents From Anthropic, OpenAI Caught Creating Fake Identities

“We’re grateful to AISI for their leadership in the important discussion about how to evaluate increasingly capable AI agents. We’re working closely with them to gather more details of the incident as we conduct our own investigation. Gaining a clear picture of Claude’s understanding of its situation—by examining its reasoning transcripts and running our own analyses—will help us identify the causes of its behaviour.”

“We are committed to working across the industry to strengthen shared practices for conducting high-risk evaluations safely, including convening stakeholders such as national AI institutes, independent evaluators, other AI labs, and other groups in the coming weeks.”

“"On 28th July 2026, AISI's Security Team detected unusual data transfers leaving our research systems during a routine cyber evaluation. On investigation, we found that some of the agents being tested had engaged in sustained, potentially harmful activity directed at real people and organisations,"”

“These attempts were unsuccessful, and our investigations have not evidenced any resulting real-world harm. But this is the first time we have seen risks around autonomy and deception manifest this clearly, without specific prompting, in the real-world.”

“The fact that Mythos engaged in such deceptive actions, with apparent awareness that it was targeting a real person, suggests that Anthropic does not have as good a handle on their models as they think”