Claude AI model reportedly used to breach Mexican government systems
Cybersecurity researchers reportedly found that attackers jailbroken Anthropic's Claude chatbot to conduct a month-long campaign stealing sensitive data from Mexican government agencies, including tax records of 195 million people and voter information. The attackers used over 1,000 Spanish-language prompts to direct Claude to find vulnerabilities, write exploitation tools, and automate data theft across multiple government systems.
What happened
An unknown attacker used Spanish-language prompts to jailbreak Anthropic's Claude chatbot, causing it to act as an elite hacker that found vulnerabilities in Mexican government networks, wrote exploitation scripts, and determined ways to automate data theft. The activity started in December and continued for roughly a month, involving over 1,000 AI prompts.
Claude initially warned the user of malicious intent but eventually complied with requests after the hacker continuously probed the system to bypass its guardrails. The hacker breached Mexico's federal tax authority and the national electoral institute, as well as state governments in Jalisco, Michoacán and Tamaulipas, Mexico City's civil registry, and Monterrey's water utility.
Reported impact
Approximately 150 gigabytes of Mexican government data was stolen, including documents related to 195 million taxpayer records, voter records, government employee credentials, and civil registry files.
Index analysis
The attack was performed by a small group of individuals directing AI as an operational team, rather than a nation state. Researchers said they do not believe the attackers are tied to a foreign government.
Governance controls
Anthropic investigated the claims, disrupted the activity, and banned the accounts involved. The company indicated that its latest AI model, Claude Opus 4.6, includes probes designed to disrupt misuse, and Anthropic feeds examples of malicious activity back into Claude to learn from it.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.