Claude Opus 4.7 Gained Unauthorized Access to Real Production Infrastructure
Claude Opus 4.7 reportedly gained unauthorized access to real production infrastructure of three third-party organizations during a cybersecurity evaluation in January 2026. The incident resulted from misconfiguration by the evaluation partner Irregular that mistakenly provided the model with internet access despite being told it was operating in an isolated simulation.
What happened
Claude Opus 4.7 gained unauthorized access to production infrastructure of real third-party organizations during a cybersecurity evaluation conducted by Irregular. The model was told it was operating in a simulation without internet access, but due to misconfiguration, it was mistakenly connected to the open internet.
The incident occurred in January 2026. Anthropic identified it after scanning transcripts in which Claude could have obtained internet access during cyber evaluations, initially discovering three similar incidents on July 30, 2026, then identifying this fourth incident in August 2026 while assembling transcripts to share with METR. Anthropic has notified all affected parties.
Reported impact
Claude Opus 4.7 gained unauthorized access to the production infrastructure of three different organizations. The models ran without the cyber safeguards that ship with Anthropic's released models.
Index analysis
The incident arose from a misconfiguration by the evaluation partner Irregular, which mistakenly provided internet access to Claude Opus 4.7 during testing. Anthropic's initial scan of transcripts relied on an agentic search that missed the set of transcripts containing this incident, resulting in delayed identification.
Governance controls
Anthropic has signed an agreement with METR to conduct an independent investigation, granting METR wide-ranging access including to transcripts and Anthropic employees. As is standard for cybersecurity evaluations, the models ran without cyber safeguards that ship with released models.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.