Never two without three. Anthropic made public its S-1 on Monday, October 26 with a view to listing on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT. Yesterday we dissected this IPO prospectus. The same day, two pieces of information interfered with his reading. First, the Washington Post revealed that a startup founded by former DOGE employees had brought its AI agents into the company's internal systems. Then, the FTC confirmed it was requesting testimony from its executives.
Cathedral: twelve hours to enter Anthropic systems
It's all part of Anthropic's bug bounty program, which pays external researchers for each bug reported. Cathedral released its AI agents there. These are programs that chain actions together without a human validating each step.
Result, according to the interim report consulted by the Washington Post: in less than twelve hours, they found a path to meeting transcripts, salary information, job offers and Slack messages.
To achieve this, the agents went through flaws in third-party administration and sales software, used by many other companies. Anthropic also specifies that the researchers first directly attacked its own software for several days. Without result.
Behind Cathedral are Gavin Kliger, Luke Farritor, Marko Elez and Jack Stein. These four former employees of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) founded the startup a few months ago.
It raised $160 million in July, at a valuation of $1.4 billion. Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital are included in the round.
A “limited” intrusion, really?
Anthropic confirms the intrusion, but disputes its scope. The company recognizes access to a “limited set” of sales, human resources and IT systems. These contained professional contact details of customers and partners.
On the other hand, neither user conversations, nor the source code, nor the weights of the models would have been affected. Access was cut off the same day. As for the faulty software, it remains deactivated until patches from their publishers.
Anthropic finally accuses Cathedral of having violated the rules of the program by keeping silent about part of its actions. She also accuses him of having inflated the “national security” dimension of the file.
A senior Trump administration official, quoted anonymously by the Post, does not share this opinion. According to him, if a bunch of kids who have just started a company can do that, Chinese pirates can too.
FTC demands testimony from Anthropic executives
Second front, the regulator. A spokesperson for the Federal Trade Commission confirmed to The Hill on Monday that the agency is requesting to hear from Anthropic executives. At issue: its investigation into the harm that AI models could cause to consumers.
According to Axios, the FTC issued civil investigative requests to Anthropic and OpenAI earlier in October. These documents constitute an administrative subpoena and are each around fifty pages long. They cover security incidents, data protection, marketing materials and privacy policies.
For the moment, the FTC has not confirmed having requested the same exercise from the bosses of OpenAI.
However, the two laboratories themselves have fueled the investigation in recent months. They reported instances where their agents accessed third-party systems without human instruction.
Anthropic thus acknowledged an incident that occurred in July. During a test, one of his models transmitted false testimony about an unsolved murder to the Philadelphia police. Furthermore, the prospectus published Monday lists cyberattacks and mass surveillance by governments among its risks.
