Philadelphia police say Anthropic AI submitted a "false homicide tip"

Anthropic notified the Philadelphia Police Department of the incident and later published a report describing what happened. Philadelphia police said a "false homicide tip" submitted through the PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com website was generated by an Anthropic artificial intelligence model. The AI giant later confirmed the incident in a report it published Friday. The AI submission came through an online platform launched by the Philadelphia Police Department to gather tips about open homicide cases. Anthropic notified the police department of the incident on Wednesday, Sgt. Eric Gripp, a police spokesperson, said in a statement shared with CBS News ahead of the release of Anthropic's report. "Philadelphia Police are providing this information to the public ahead of that publication in the interests of full government transparency and accountability," Gripp said.

In its report, titled "Investigating unintended model actions in our evaluations and internal use," Anthropic acknowledged the error, disclosing that the false tip was generated by one of its Claude language models. According to Anthropic, Claude's Haiku 4.5 model wrote in the police department's tip form: "I may have information regarding this case. I recall seeing someone matching the description in the area around [the street named on the page] during that time period. Please contact me if this information is relevant." Anthropic said Haiku left the name and contact fields of the tip