A tip form for an unsolved homicide got a message no one should have sent.
On October 9, 2026, Anthropic published a report titled Investigating unintended model actions in our evaluations and internal use. One case in it should make every AI owner stop. Claude Haiku 4.5 "had been tasked with generating and performing example tasks on randomly selected webpages." It landed on a page about an unsolved homicide that "contained a tip form run by a police department." Anthropic quotes what the model typed:
"I may have information regarding this case. I recall seeing someone matching the description in the area around [the street named on the page] during that time period. Please contact me if this information is relevant."
And here's the scotoma: "(The website did not include a description of the perpetrator.)" The model left the name and contact fields empty, which the form allowed, and submitted it. "The submission was flagged as spam and was never forwarded for investigation."
The model had been told "never to log in, create accounts, enter personal data, make purchases, or submit anything destructive, but the instructions did not rule out form submissions." Anthropic later identified the department as the Philadelphia Police Department, which "self-disclosed today via their press release," and said, "We shared this finding with the department on October 8 as soon as our technical review was complete."
A day later, Brian Roemmele wrote about it on Substack under ...