Anthropic reveals foreign actors have used ‘data poisoning’ to corrupt models with government propaganda

AI giant Anthropic has revealed in an Australian parliamentary inquiry that foreign actors have sought to corrupt their models with government-aligned propaganda through “data poisoning” in training.

The maker of Claude AI is one of several called to give evidence at the Sydney hearings on Tuesday, including OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google.

Anthony Albanese’s AI lead Andrew Charlton said after unprecedented cybersecurity breaches to government websites by rogue Open AI agents “ big tech has some big questions to answer”.

“We have set this up as a government in a bipartisan way to make sure that Australians get answers to some of these questions from the big tech companies,” he said.

During Anthropic testimony, its head of safeguards Dave Orr said their researchers had found an emerging trend where governments were attempting to manipulate models to spread biased information.

“Pretraining is the first phase of training where very large amounts of information. So, we scan this for poisoning, and we have found some attempts,” he said.

“Maybe some unintentional… but some things that look like governments intending to convince the models to answer propagandistically in their particular language.”

During Anthropic’s testimony representatives admitted they were still learning the best practice to notify countries if breaches similar to the Medicare statistics “hack” in June occurred.

Anthropic’s international “Special Envoy” Jeff Bleich said that while the company had “pioneered” transparency policies he admitted it too was “still learning” how to respond.

“We have a safety plan that’s also transparent. We issue a misuse report currently on a regular basis, and we will continue to try and be good partners in helping explain the risks and identify them,” he said.

“But… Right now this is largely voluntary, and when we’re still learning technology and learning how to conduct investigations as well.”

Their head of policy for Australia and New Zealand David Masters suggested Australia needed to update transparency requirements similar to laws in the US to streamline notifications of incidents.

“There are transparency requirements in some laws, particularly in California, that do require notification of critical safety incidents, and we would welcome similar laws here in Australia to clarify that,” Mr Masters said.

Earlier in the day the committee heard testimonies from the creative and copyright industry, including ABC, The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, Copyright Agency and Copyright Council.

Copyright Agency’s Josephine Johnston warned Australian politicians to ensure there were no loopholes or loosening of copyright laws or the nation could become the “data-laundering” hub of the world.

“In our submission, we pointed to a particularly egregious example of behavior which happens overseas, but if we change our copyright laws in Australia… very unfortunate consequences that could occur,” she said.

“That was to do with the mass digitisation and then destruction of books.

“We’ve all read about it, where the AI developers are hoovering up all of the second-hand books. They digitise them. They destroy the books, and then they have this massive dataset of high-quality content or data that they can use for training that they have paid a pittance for.

“If Australia was to enact some sort of framework that would enable the importation of those datasets into Australia, it would turn Australia into the data laundering centre of the world.

“We must be cautious. I urge the committee to consider those knock-on consequences. We want Australia to be a strong supporter of intellectual property, it’s a property right reflecting intellectual and artistic endeavours. We want to uphold that, even while we’re attracting investment.”