Cathedral, a cybersecurity startup founded by former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employees, notified Anthropic that its researchers had accessed sensitive internal systems through vulnerabilities in third-party business software. According to Sina Finance, a draft Cathedral report said researchers used AI agents for less than 12 hours to find access to meeting notes, employee compensation and hiring details, and Slack messages discussing Anthropic’s advanced AI models.

Anthropic confirmed access to parts of its sales, human resources, and IT systems, but said the researchers did not access customer prompts, model responses, source code, or model weights. The company said its monitoring systems had flagged some activity before Cathedral reported the findings, and that it cut off access that day, disabled the affected software, and notified federal officials. Anthropic said Cathedral overstated the national-security implications and did not fully disclose its activities under the company’s bug bounty program; Cathedral said it limited data access to the minimum necessary.

Cathedral has contracts with three federal agencies. Investors value the company at $1.4 billion, and it has raised $160 million. Alex Stamos, Cognition’s chief information security officer, called the findings a major issue and said the risks of connecting third-party applications to corporate systems are serious.