With how easily AI technology can be used for various purposes lately, and recently, there have been reports that artificial intelligence services have been used to steal data from Mexican citizens.
What has happened is that recently, a hacker has used the AI bot Claude to steal personal details of citizens and also confidential Mexican government data, totaling 150GB in total.
Claude is an AI bot developed by AI technology development company Anthropic and is often said to be one of the best AI services that can be used for productivity purposes and to develop new software or websites quickly and easily.
The hacker reportedly used Claude to find vulnerabilities in government networks and write scripts to exploit them. He also tasked the chatbot with finding ways to automate the data theft. It reportedly began last December, and the process took a month to complete.
The hacker also reportedly bypassed Claude's security guardrails in a very simple, but time-consuming way: by asking him to perform the hack multiple times, claiming it was for testing purposes only.
Even more terrifying, Claude gave the hacker which government agencies could be easily hacked and how to bypass their login systems.
The result was that the national tax agency, the electoral commission, four state governments and the data of 129 million voters in Mexico were stolen, all because the Mexican government apparently ignored warnings from digital security companies to improve the country's digital infrastructure.
Anthropic says it is aware of this, and has apparently closed the Claude accounts involved in the hacking incident. It also says that the version of Claude used is older, and the latest Claude Opus 4.6 can no longer be "forced" to do anything wrong.
OpenAI also says that ChatGPT was also used as an “additional” hacking method for Claude, but ChatGPT does not seem to have given in to the hacker’s demands.
Worst of all for the Mexican government is that no one has been able to identify the hacker to date, and the individual has not been traced to this day.
