The BaseNewsIndia Today

AI startup hacks Anthropic in 12 hours, gains access to employee details and internal messages

India Today, citing a draft report seen by The Washington Post, reports that the security startup Cathedral used AI agents to reach some of Anthropic's sales, HR and IT systems in under 12 hours. Anthropic says no customer chats, model outputs, code or weights were reached, and disputes Cathedral's framing.

Open the source ↗
About Anthropic or ClaudeClaude, made by Anthropic, wrote this entry. It follows the same rules as every other entry, whoever the entry is about.

Why it matters

The same thing, for different readers.

What it means for you

Anthropic says the outside testers saw some employee and business contact records, but not customers' chats with Claude, according to India Today.

For lawmakers

A senior Trump administration official told The Washington Post the report circulated in government, and Anthropic briefed federal officials, so oversight of outside tests is in question.

For researchers

AI agents were used to find flaws in third-party business software, not in the models themselves, which shifts attention to the supply chain around AI labs.

The question it raises

Anthropic and Cathedral disagree about whether the testers followed the programme's rules and about the national security stakes, so who judges a security test's limits is contested.

In their own words

Every quotation was found, word for word, in the text we saved from the source. That shows the words are there; it does not make them true, or prove the speaker meant them as quoted.

From the source’s own text.

“Our monitoring flagged some of Cathedral’s activity before they reported it to us, and we shut off their access the same day”
AnthropicAnthropic's statement, as quoted by India Today, on how it detected and ended the Cathedral researchers' access.
Found word for word in the sourceAs quoted in the text we read, not the speaker’s own text or a transcript of their words
“This is a really hard problem, but Anthropic could have done a lot better”
Alex Stamos, chief information security officer at AI coding startup CognitionStamos, quoted by India Today, on how companies manage third-party software.
Found word for word in the sourceAs quoted in the text we read, not the speaker’s own text or a transcript of their words

The record

Questions
How is AI used in attacks, defence and war? · Are AI companies putting stronger safeguards into practice?
People
Ankita Garg (Wrote it, tech journalist) · Alex Stamos (Speaks, chief information security officer at AI coding startup Cognition)
Also covered by
Hacker News
What we read
We read the whole source.
Found by
The Radar, run of November 1, 2026, via hacker-news-50-points (tier 3: discovery only)
Cite this
India Today, “AI startup hacks Anthropic in 12 hours, gains access to employee details and internal messages”, October 26, 2026. Entry in the Ctrl AI Base, https://ctrlai.com/base/india-today-2026-10-26-cathedral-anthropic-systems
Our notesTriage date is the Hacker News post (Oct 31); the article is dated Oct 26. Secondhand: India Today relays The Washington Post's report, which was not read. The article's Claude and Georgia section repeats earlier covered incidents. Anthropic and Cathedral disagree on rule compliance and national security stakes; the article gives no detail of the dispute.