The government of Alberta has employed Claude AI to locate and fix cyber security vulnerabilities across government systems, said to assess 466 million lines of code, implement fixes, and run continuous security review.
Claude Code’s Opus and Sonnet models have been used to analyse systems in all 27 provincial ministries, covering 1,280 applications and 3,400 code repositories, most of which the government notes “has never undergone a systematic security review”, and with accumulated technical debt estimated to cost into the billions of dollars.
An internal team has been tasked with making these government systems more secure, and has worked with Claude to assess 466 million lines of government code in 20 hours, with around 50 agents working autonomously to scan for security vulnerabilities and gaps in technical documentation. “Claude Code ran a two-stage routine, first scanning each repository with a rules engine to flag known patterns, then reviewing those flags and citing the exact file and line for each finding so developers could verify them,” Anthropic reports, estimating that this kind of review could normally take over six years.
Claude reportedly implemented and tested fixes, redesigning code in a more modern language where it was too outdated, and rebuilding systems in as little as four days.
A set of specialised Claude review agents will continue to run continuous security review, with agents probing applications to find out how vulnerabilities might be exploited, and others writing remediation plans pointing to fixes. “Every agent is checked against roughly 95 security controls on each pass,” Anthropic shares. “These agents are built on top of the Claude Agent SDK and run a robust series of checks and analysis for every application.”
Plans for further modernisation include the consolidation of 185 legacy applications into 16 reusable applications, reducing complexity and lowering maintenance costs. Beginning in Autumn, the government will also launch a programme to scale its approach across the provincial government.
Nate Glubish, minister of technology and innovation for Alberta, said: “By using AI to find and fix vulnerabilities across our systems, we accomplished in hours what would have taken a traditional approach years to complete. This is what responsible government looks like in the AI era, and the best is still ahead of us.”
Wider trend: Health AI
For a recent session focusing on AI in healthcare, HTN was joined by an expert panel including Simon Brown, head of digital at Royal Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust; Wahida Jabarzai, clinical AI and automation delivery lead at University Hospitals of Northamptonshire and University Hospitals of Leicester; and Julian Wiggins, healthcare solution director at Rackspace Technology. Our panel considered the wider challenge of AI adoption, looking at what makes a successful deployment, introducing AI safely and sustainably at scale, and some of the use cases currently delivering value across their organisations.
The MHRA has published findings from the National Commission into the Regulation of AI in Healthcare research, pointing to the need to balance a desire to use AI in improving patient care and supporting healthcare professionals, with “safe, fast and trusted” regulation. Almost three-quarters of respondents (73 percent) disagreed or strongly disagreed that the current regulatory framework is sufficient to ensure safety and performance standards; with 61 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed with its effectiveness in tackling data governance and data privacy. 61 percent also thought current requirements for clinical evidence are insufficient, and 65 percent pointed to a need for more to be done on post-market surveillance.
An AI system is being used to colour code internal anatomy during surgery at London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust, said to help surgeons to see subtle structures that might be hard to distinguish with the eye. The Eureka system analyses the surgical field in real-time, overlaying colours onto structures such as nerves and connective tissue. Surgeons are able to choose between keeping the overlay constant, or having it pulse intermittently during different stages of a procedure. LNWH shares hopes that use of Eureka will enhance precision, reduce risk of accidental injury, and help to support surgeons during complex procedures.
