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Anthropic suffered a security breach after a newly founded US-based AI startup successfully hacked its systems and accessed sensitive internal company data.
The startup, Cathedral, was founded this year by former employees of the US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
According to reports, the breach was carried out as part of a bugs bounty program to encourage outside security researchers to uncover flaws. The intrusion exposed internal Slack messages, meeting transcripts, staff salaries and job offers.
Anthropic confirmed that Cathedral managed to access a “limited set” of sales, HR and IT systems, but assured customers that user conversations with the Claude AI model and the model’s underlying source code remain completely uncompromised.
“Our surveillance flagged some of the cathedral’s activity before they reported it to us,” Anthropic said in an official statement. “We disabled their access the same day”.
While the cathedral claimed the breach was carried out in less than 12 hours, Anthropic pushed back on that timeline, claiming the activity involved attempts over several days.
A spokesperson added that the cathedral’s actions “significantly went beyond” the intended scope of the Bugs Bounty program by specifically targeting third-party applications.
Cybersecurity experts note that the incident did not stem from an advanced, sophisticated AI exploit, but rather a basic hygiene error with third-party software.
Heath Mullins, chief evangelist at ExtraHop, highlighted the wider supply chain implications for the tech sector: “When a handful of platforms sit at the center of how a majority of businesses operate, a single compromise becomes a supply chain problem for everyone downstream”.
The security breach comes at a delicate time for Anthropic, arriving just hours after the lab filed documents for a massive initial public offering (IPO) on Nasdaq. The prospectus highlights the company’s grand ambitions to cure major diseases and shape the global economy, while also warning investors of potentially catastrophic risks.
Meanwhile, the breach has sparked sharp geopolitical anxiety: a senior Trump administration official warned: “If a bunch of kids who just started a company can do that, the Chinese are potentially not far behind”.
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