AI incident #1430 ·

Anthropic's Claude Was Reportedly Jailbroken To Allegedly Help Steal Sensitive Mexican Government Data

What happened

An unknown attacker reportedly jailbroke Anthropic's Claude and used it during a December 2025-January 2026 campaign against Mexican government systems. According to Gambit Security, the attacker used Claude to identify vulnerabilities and to generate exploitation scripts, which were then used to plan automated data theft. The attack reportedly contributed to theft of 150 GB of taxpayer, voter, government employee, and civil-registry data.

Only the incident metadata is stored here. The underlying news reports are on the AI Incident Database (CC BY-SA 4.0); use the links above to read them.

News reports (2)

Coverage catalogued by the AI Incident Database. Titles link to the original publisher; the text is not reproduced here.

  1. Prevention has lost its edge. Resilience is the winning play.
    gambit.security · Curtis Simpson, Eyal Sela, Dolev Cfir · AIID #7042
  2. Hacker Used Anthropic’s Claude to Steal Mexican Data Trove
    bloomberg.com · Andrew Martin, Carolina Millan · AIID #7041

Who was involved

Alleged deployer
Unknown Hacker
Alleged developer
Anthropic
Alleged harmed party
Mexican Taxpayers, Mexican Voters, Mexican Government Employees, State Government Of Tamaulipas, State Government Of Michoacan, State Government Of Jalisco, Monterrey Water And Drainage Services, Servicio De Administracion Tributaria (Sat), Instituto Nacional Electoral (Ine), Direccion General Del Registro Civil De La Ciudad De Mexico (Dgrc)

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Causal entity
AI
Intent
Unintentional
Timing
Post-deployment
Harm level
Sectors
Countries

Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 4.2.

  • Business operations/infrastructure damage

    "Business operations/infrastructure damage - Damage, disruption, or destruction of a business system and/or its components due to malfunction, cyberattacks, etc."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Violence/armed conflict

    "Violence/armed conflict - Use or misuse of a technology system to incite, facilitate or conduct cyberattacks, security breaches, lethal, biological and chemical weapons development, resulting in violence and armed confl...

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Security & Defense

    "AI could enable more serious incidents to occur by lowering the cost of devising cyber-attacks and enabling more targeted incidents. The same programming error or hacker attack could be replicated on numerous machines....

    The Rise of Artificial Intelligence - Future Outlooks and Emerging Risks (Allianz2018)

  • Catastrophic risk due to autonomous weapons programmed with dangerous targets

    "AI could enable autonomous vehicles, such as drones, to be utilized as weapons. Such threats are often underestimated."

    The Rise of Artificial Intelligence - Future Outlooks and Emerging Risks (Allianz2018)

  • Hazardous Biological and Chemical Technologies

    "AI systems such as LLMs, chemical LLMs (Skinnider et al., 2021; Moret et al., 2023), and other LLM- based biological design tools might soon facilitate the production of bioweapons, chemical weapons, and other hazardous...

    Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)

  • Warfare and Physical Harm

    "The use of AI in warfare is highly alarming and may pose dangers to human safety (Hendrycks et al., 2023). Autonomous drone warfare is being aggressively pursued as a tactic in the current war in Ukraine (Meaker, 2023),...

    Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)

  • Cyber offence

    "General- purpose AI systems could uplift the cyber expertise of individuals, making it easier for malicious users to conduct effective cyber- attacks, as well as providing a tool that can be used in cyber defence. Gener...

    International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI (Bengio2024)

  • Dual use science risks

    "General- purpose AI systems could accelerate advances in a range of scientific endeavours, from training new scientists to enabling faster research workflows. While these capabilities could have numerous beneficial appl...

    International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI (Bengio2024)

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