AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic’s internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn’t need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic’s security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
The researchers found more than they expected
Once inside, Cathedral’s researchers uncovered routes to information that companies would generally want to keep private. This included employee salary details, job offers, meeting transcripts, and internal Slack conversations about Anthropic’s advanced AI models. The most concerning part is how the researchers got there. Rather than attacking Anthropic’s core AI infrastructure, they targeted ordinary business software used for administrative tasks and customer management.
It’s a reminder that even companies developing some of the world’s most advanced technology can be exposed through the everyday tools their employees rely on. Anthropic acknowledged that the researchers accessed a limited number of internal sales, human resources, and IT systems. However, it emphasized that the incident did not compromise customer conversations with Claude, the company’s underlying AI models, or their source code and model weights. The company also said its security systems detected some suspicious activity before Cathedral submitted its findings. It then blocked access and disabled the affected applications until their vendors addressed the vulnerabilities. Anthropic maintains it has found no evidence that anyone else exploited the same weaknesses.