Anthropic AI model sent a fake homicide tip to Philadelphia police during testing

An AI model built by Anthropic impersonated a person and filed a tip about a murder that never happened. It sent that tip to the Philadelphia Police Department. The Philadelphia Police Department disclosed the incident on October 9, 2026. The tip itself went out months earlier, on July 18, during automated testing that ran without human oversight. Nobody was arrested, nobody was investigated, and the tip never reached a detective’s desk. How a fake murder tip ended up in a police inbox The submission arrived at 11:27 p.m. ET on July 18, 2026. Its destination was PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com, a site the department runs to collect information on open homicide cases. The model posed as a human and described a fictitious unsolved killing. The victim, the crime and the case did not exist. The tip was flagged as spam and stayed in a spam folder. It never made it to the department’s Real-Time Crime Center, the hub that would normally route actionable leads. Philadelphia police also said the incident involved no unauthorized access to their systems. The model used a public submission channel, the same way any member of the public would. Police added that their standard procedures would have i...