Hackers Exploit Anthropic and OpenAI Models to Target Mexican Water Systems
Municipal water supply and drainage systems managed by Mexican government agencies are critical infrastructure. A breach could disrupt household water supplies and wastewater treatment and threaten public safety. The incident involving Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT highlights how generative AI can improve efficiency while also lowering the barriers to planning and carrying out cyberattacks.
The latest investigation found that hackers used Claude and GPT to map infiltration routes, assess the significance of Mexican water-sector targets and develop automated attack scripts aimed at government-run water supply and drainage systems. However, available information did not specify the exact date of the breach, the number of cities affected, the financial losses or the scale of any system outages.
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The history behind this eventHackers Use Claude and ChatGPT to Target Mexican Government, Exposing More Than 100 Million Confidential Records
Cybersecurity firm Gambit Security said a hacker primarily used Anthropic’s Claude, alongside OpenAI’s ChatGPT, to target nine Mexican government bodies, including the Tax Administration Service, or SAT, the National Electoral Institute, or INE, and state governments. The incident shows how commercial generative AI can accelerate vulnerability discovery, coding and data processing, allowing even a single attacker to scale up an intrusion.
Gambit disclosed on February 24, 2026, that the attacks ran from late December 2025 through mid-February 2026. About 150 GB of data was exfiltrated, involving 195 million taxpayer records as well as voter rolls, civil-servant credentials and civil registry data. SAT and INE denied on February 25 that their systems had been breached, saying audits found no unauthorized access. No financial losses have been disclosed.
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