It's been an eventful week for AI startup Anthropic, creator of the Claude family of large language models and associated chatbots.
The company says that on Monday, January 22nd, it became aware that a contractor inadvertently sent a file containing non-sensitive customer information to a third party.
The finding came just before the Federal Trade Commission, the U.S. agency in charge of regulating market competition, announced it was investigating Anthropic's strategic partnerships with Amazon and Google - as well as those of rival OpenAI with its backer Microsoft.
Anthropic's spokesperson emphasized that the breach is in no way related to the FTC probe, on which they declined to comment.
The PC-centric news outlet Windows Report recently got ahold of and posted a screenshot of an email sent by Anthropic to customers acknowledging the leak of their information by one of its third-party contractors.
We wanted to let you know that one of our contractors inadvertently misdirected some accounts receivable information from Anthropic to a third party.
The information included your account name, as maintained in our systems, and accounts receivable information as of December 31, 2023 - i.e., it said you were a customer with open credit balances at the end of the year.
This information did not include sensitive personal data, including banking or payment information, or prompts/outputs.
Based on our investigation to date, the contractor's actions were an isolated error that didn't arise from or result in any of our systems being breached.
The leak is notable in that data breaches are at an all-time high, with a whopping 95% traced to human error.
VentureBeat's reporting and events have revealed that many technical decision makers in enterprises large and small have strong concerns that company data could be compromised through LLMs, as was the case with Samsung last spring, which all-out banned ChatGPT after employees leaked sensitive company data.
Anthropic, an OpenAI rival, has been on a meteoric rise since its inception in 2021.
The unicorn is reportedly valued at $18.4 billion and raised $750 million in three funding rounds last year, will receive up to $2 billion from Google and another $4 billion from Amazon.
The company's relationship with AWS and Google has raised concern with the FTC. This week, the agency issued 6(b) orders to Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and Alphabet requesting detailed information on their multi-billion-dollar relationships.
Microsoft and OpenAI's extended partnership announced on January 23, 2023; Amazon and Anthropic's strategic collaboration announced on September 25, 2023; Google's expanded AI partnership with Anthropic, announced on November 8, 2023.
Among other details, the companies are being asked to provide agreements and rationale for collaborations and their implications; analysis of competitive impact; and information on any other government entities requesting information or performing investigations.
Anthropic has been a partner with AWS and Google and its owner Alphabet since its inception, and its collaboration with both has expanded substantially in just a short period of time.
Amazon has announced that it is investing up to $4 billion and will have a minority ownership in Anthropic.
AWS is also Anthropic's primary cloud provider and is providing its chips to the startup.
Through its partnership with Google and Alphabet Anthropic uses Google Cloud security services, PostgreSQL-compatible database and BigQuery data warehouse, and has deployed Google's TPU v5e for its Claude large language model.
This Cyber News was published on venturebeat.com. Publication date: Fri, 26 Jan 2024 23:13:03 +0000