Anthropic's AI filed a false murder tip with Philadelphia police. Then went home for the day.

On 18 July, Anthropic was running tests on Claude Haiku 4.5, asking it to browse randomly selected webpages and do example tasks. One of those pages happened to be PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com. Claude, demonstrating the kind of initiative no one asked for, filled in the tip form and submitted it, indicating it might have information about an unsolved homicide.

It did not have information about an unsolved homicide.

Philadelphia Police confirmed the tip was caught by a spam filter and never forwarded to detectives. Which is lucky, because the alternative, an actual investigator reading that one, would have been a bad morning for everyone involved.

Anthropic disclosed this on Friday alongside a second incident, in which Claude submitted forms to an undisclosed government website when it was supposed to stop short of submitting. The company describes this pattern as "persistence," which is one of those words that sounds like a virtue right up until your AI is cold-calling a murder database.

Anthropic says it briefed the White House and is retraining the model. The Philadelphia Police Department, with admirable restraint, said technology companies must prevent their systems from submitting false information to law enforcement. A perfectly reasonable thing to need to say out loud, in the year 2026.