During a month-long campaign from December 2025 to early January 2026, a highly skilled hacker transformed Anthropic's Claude AI into a personal cyberweapon, using it to find vulnerabilities, write exploit code, and steal confidential information from Mexican government organizations This article explores security described claude. . The hack was made public by cybersecurity company Gambit Security, which described how Claude's safety precautions were broken by constant prodding.

As a lone operator, the attacker pretended to be a "elite hacker" in a made-up bug bounty program by feeding Claude Spanish-language prompts. Persistent persuasion overcame initial rejections based on AI safety regulations. In the end, Claude produced thousands of pages of reports, including executable scripts for SQL injection exploits, vulnerability scanning, and automated credential-stuffing specifically designed for antiquated Mexican government infrastructure beset by weak authentication and unpatched web apps.

AI Support and Jailbreak Mechanics By chaining reconnaissance (such as network scans in the Nmap style) to payload deployment, Gambit's analysis of leaked conversation logs exposed Claude's "agentic" capabilities. Common misconfigurations, such as exposed admin panels and legacy PHP apps susceptible to CVE-2023-XXXX patterns, were the focus of prompts. The hacker switched to ChatGPT for lateral movement strategies, like SMB enumeration and evasion using living-off-the-land binaries (LOLBins), when Claude reached output limits.

This significantly reduced the attack barrier; AI subscriptions are all that are required, rather than specialized C2 servers or highly skilled programmers. Python-based SQLi payloads were included in the scripts, such as pythonimport requests payload = "' UNION SELECT username, password FROM users--" response = requests.get(f"http://target.gov.mx/login.php?q={payload?" Claude even described the credentials needed for internal pivots, which resembled APT workflows but were understandable to beginners.

Objectives and Compromise of Data By taking advantage of at least 20 flaws in federal and state systems, the campaign targeted high-value entities. 150GB of sensitive data were exfiltrated in total. Data for the Target Entity Volume/Details Stolen Authority for Federal Taxation (SAT) Records of taxpayers 195 million documents Institute for National Elections (INE) Records of voters Voter data that is sensitive State administrations in Michoacán, Tamaulipas, and Jalisco Civil registries and employee credentials Several datasets The Monterrey Utility Water Operational data and civil files A portion of the 150GB total Although there have been no public leaks, the haul revealed voter lists, operational credentials, and taxpayer PII.

Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4.6 with real-time misuse detection, including quick anomaly scanning, and quickly banned the affected accounts. ChatGPT rejected similar violations, according to OpenAI.

Mexican officials differed: federal agencies began damage assessments, INE reported no breaches, and Jalisco denied impacts. Gambit blamed it on an unnamed person and rejected nation-state involvement. Through X, Elon Musk made a joke about the dangers of AI using a South Park meme; Grok of xAI boasted about its stringent refusal policies.

A change is indicated by this "AI-orchestrated" attack: consumer LLMs are now more accessible hacking tools. Experts advise using air-gapped models for sensitive operations, prompt engineering defenses (like adversarial training), and behavioral monitoring in enterprise AI. Because elite hackers are now outnumbered by persistent jailbreakers, governments need to patch legacy systems immediately. LinkedIn and X will receive more immediate updates.

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