Elon Musk’s DOGE Staffers Went From Jobless to Hacking Anthropic
Remember DOGE? Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which was appointed by Trump to minimize prices and streamline federal operations. Its former workers at the moment are hacking AI large Anthropic.
Four ex-employees of DOGE hacked Anthropic’s inside techniques utilizing AI brokers inside 12 hours. The information broke on the identical day Anthropic filed to go public.
How Did a Small Startup Get Inside Anthropic?
DOGE was the cost-cutting workplace Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy ran for President Donald Trump. Its 2025 cuts helped push greater than 250,000 folks out of the federal workforce.
The workplace itself closed on July 4, 2026, with little fanfare. Less than three weeks later, 4 of its alumni surfaced with a $1.4 billion navy cyber startup.
The startup known as Cathedral, based by Gavin Kliger, Luke Farritor, Marko Elez, and Jack Stein.
The researchers first spent a number of days attacking Anthropic’s personal software program, Anthropic mentioned. They failed. So the AI brokers went round it. They hit unnamed outdoors instruments used for gross sales and admin work.
Those routes led to assembly transcripts, salaries, job presents, and Slack chats about superior AI fashions, in accordance to a Cathedral draft report seen by the Post.
“The incontrovertible fact that weaknesses in extraordinary enterprise software program can compromise the infrastructure of even essentially the most superior organizations must be a wake-up name for each firm in America,” the Post indicated, citing Cathedral’s draft report.
This was not a criminal offense. It ran via Anthropic’s bug bounty program, which pays outsiders to discover and report safety holes.
Why Is Anthropic Pushing Back?
Anthropic confirmed Cathedral reached a “restricted set” of its gross sales, HR, and IT techniques. It mentioned buyer chats, supply code, and mannequin weights, the recordsdata that make Claude work, had been by no means touched.
“Our monitoring flagged a few of Cathedral’s exercise earlier than they reported it to us, and we shut off their entry the identical day,” the report acknowledged, citing Anthropic.
Anthropic additionally mentioned Cathedral broke program guidelines by not disclosing all its exercise, and overstated the nationwide safety danger.
Cathedral raised $160 million in July at a $1.4 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital. A senior Trump administration official informed the Post three federal businesses have employed the startup.
Anthropic now heads toward its Nasdaq IPO debut, after a public submitting reported Monday. It’s reported valuation of up to $2 trillion is “nuts”, in accordance to Nigel Green, CEO of monetary advisory agency deVere Group.
Anthropic says it discovered no signal that anybody else used the issues.
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