A contractor employed by Accenture allegedly connected a secure, centralized Department of Defense (DOD) system to a personal account for Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding agent. This connection reportedly allowed the AI agent to send information regarding the DOD system, including login credentials, to a high-risk third-party website. The centralized system houses controlled unclassified information (CUI), which includes sensitive data on topics such as critical infrastructure, nuclear submarine propulsion, and vulnerabilities to chemical and biological terrorism. A source aware of the incident, who requested anonymity, stated that the breach “puts all the data that’s in there at risk,” adding that if the third-party software was compromised, “there could be somebody out there with the ability to log into a secure environment without anyone knowing. It’s 100 percent a national security threat and could cause irreparable harm.”
The Accenture spokesperson told WIRED that the company “fully complied with our legal and contractual obligations” regarding the allegations. The employee allegedly connected the secure production environment to the personal Claude account to enable the AI agent to write and deploy code, a practice for which Anthropic’s usage policy instructs users not to do. The AI agent reportedly ran on the DOD network for two months before the vulnerability was identified and patched. Sources indicated that Accenture did not initially report the breach to the government, despite federal contractors being required to report any cybersecurity incident within 72 hours of discovery.
Accenture currently holds over $3.5 billion in contracts with the federal government, with nearly $605 million of that amount allocated to the DOD. The company also contracts with other federal agencies, including the Department of Education, the General Services Administration, and the Department of Energy. Separately, the Federal Bureau of Investigation found that an Accenture contractor failed to patch a vulnerability, which allowed the hacking group ShinyHunters access to details belonging to thousands of FBI employees, leading the FBI to remove that contractor in early October.
Matt Triner, founder of Hunter Strategy, stated that the issue exemplifies conflicting demands faced by government contractors. Triner noted that organizations are sometimes penalized for reporting incidents, even when doing so is the legally required action, though he added that an incident like the one described is “absolutely one that would need to be reported.”
