PHILADELPHIA, Oct. 14 -- A tip form on the police department's unsolved-murders website received a message at 11:27 p.m. on July 18: "I may have information regarding this case." It came from an artificial-intelligence model that had been told to practice tasks on random webpages.

Philadelphia police said on Tuesday that an Anthropic model had sent the tip, and Anthropic's report names it as Claude Haiku 4.5. The tip was flagged as spam and never forwarded to homicide investigators, the department said. "Unsolved cases involve real victims, grieving families and investigators working to secure answers," it said, adding that "the two-month delay in detecting and reporting the incident to the City is unacceptable."

The police timeline is ...