Two days after the Federal Trade Commission launched an inquiry into generative AI investments of five leading firms including Anthropic, the AI startup valued at $18 billion has confirmed a data leak.
The year 2024 has proven to be quite eventful as of not for the company founded by ex-OpenAI siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei. Earlier this week on January 22, the company realised that one of their contractors inadvertently shared a file containing customer information with a third party. While the company said the information leaked was “non-sensitive” the file detailed a subset of customer names and open credit balances of 2023.
An Anthropic spokesperson confirmed that the incident was caused due to human error and not related to their in-house AI systems. The affected customers have been notified and provided with the relevant guidance, they told VentureBeat. While they highlighted that the breach had nothing to do with the FTC investigation, they declined to comment on the probe.
Anthropic received $4 billion from Amazon in September 2023 which will be investigated by the FTC. The inquiry by the Commission will detail the specifics of this and similar investments between Alphabet, Microsoft, and OpenAI, seeking information on agreements, strategic rationales, and the practical implications of these partnerships, including decisions on product releases, governance, and oversight rights.
The news of the leak confirmed one of fears of enterprises that have just begun to deploy third-party large language models with their proprietary data, in this instance the LLM being Anthropic’s Claude. The startup founded in 2021 has previously assured its users that it made Claude available “to safety- and societal impacts-minded researchers via a special research access program and has done so in select cases since 2022 – before Claude was commercially available – in line with Anthropic’s public benefit mission.
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