Claude Calls The Cops: Anthropic's AI Filed A Fake Murder Tip With Philly Police, Then Took 81 Days To Mention It

Anthropic disclosed new “unintended model actions” after a contractor-based explanation no longer covered the headlines. The most striking case involves a Claude model fabricating a witness tip related to an unsolved homicide and submitting it through Philadelphia’s public tip form. Anthropic said Claude Haiku 4.5 was running sample tasks on randomly selected webpages, and one run landed on PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com, the police site launched in 2019. The model filled out the tip form with a supposed sighting, even though it had never been to Philadelphia and the page contained no suspect description. The submission was timestamped July 18, 2026 at 11:27 p.m. The police said their spam filter stopped it before reaching the Real-Time Crime Center.