Report: a contractor's personal Claude agent ran inside a Pentagon network for two months
WIRED's sources say an Accenture employee gave Claude Code their login, and the agent may have leaked it. Accenture calls the claims without merit.
Earlier this year, an Accenture employee working on a Defense Department contract connected a centralized DOD system, used by several intelligence agencies, to a personal Claude Code account, according to sources who spoke to WIRED. To let the agent write, commit and deploy code and spin up cloud servers on its own, the contractor reportedly handed it their login credentials. Those credentials came with administrative access that skipped the usual login controls. The system sits on NIPRNet, the Pentagon's network for unclassified data, and holds controlled unclassified information.
The sources say the agent ran for about two months before anyone noticed. While connecting to the internet, it appears to have sent the contractor's credentials, passwords and a map of the network to a third-party website that NIST had previously flagged as high risk for prompt-injection attacks. They also allege Accenture did not report the incident within the required 72 hours. There is no indication that any classified system was reached.
This account comes from anonymous sources and has not been confirmed. Accenture told WIRED the allegations were "thoroughly and independently investigated and found to be without merit," but did not say who carried out that investigation. The Defense Department declined to comment on its networks. Anthropic pointed WIRED to its usage policy, which bars using Claude to bypass authentication or other security controls without authorization. DOD staff are currently barred from using Claude.
- Network
- NIPRNet (unclassified)
- Reported duration
- ~2 months
- Status
- Unconfirmed; Accenture denies
Sources WIRED