Security Researcher Used Claude Opus 4.7 to Gain Admin Access to Front Gate Tickets, Found He Could Issue Free VIP Passes to Nearly Every Major U.S. Music Festival

A new case has emerged that underscores exactly how capable AI tools are at offensive security work, even when the researcher's intentions are benign.

What Carroll Found

In April, security researcher Ian Carroll used Claude Opus 4.7 to probe Front Gate Tickets, a Live Nation Entertainment subsidiary that handles ticketing for nearly every major American music festival, including Lollapalooza, South by Southwest, and Austin City Limits. According to Wired, Carroll discovered a bug that, once exploited, gave him super-administrator access to Front Gate's internal systems.

From that position, Carroll could access millions of customer and staff records. He could also issue tickets to any event, at any price, to anyone he chose.

"It was pretty cool to see a ticket that's $4,000, and I could just hit a button and issue as many as I wanted," Carroll told Wired. "I could go to every single event with no limitations or restrictions: I could get the backstage pass or whatever they sell to the super VIPs, even if it's sold out."

Carroll runs the startup Seats.aero and also works as an independent security researcher. He is a member of Anthropic's Cyber Verification Program, a formal arrangement that gives approved researchers access to Claude for specific offensive security functions.

He Reported It. Front Gate Fixed It.

Carroll did NOT use the access to obtain tickets or extract personal data. He reported the vulnerability to Front Gate, which patched it within 24 hours.

In a statement to Wired, Front Gate confirmed the timeline and said there is "no evidence of exploitation, ticket impact, or compromise of customer information." The company characterized the episode as a productive security collaboration and thanked Carroll for the responsible disclosure.

Front Gate also clarified what Carroll had accessed: according to the company's statement, it was "an internal API used by entry scanners at festival venues—not a consumer-facing system or public login portal." Carroll, however, disputes this characterization, telling Wired that he did in fact access the site via a public-facing login portal.

The Harder Question

The strongest concern here is not about Carroll. He behaved exactly as a good-faith researcher should. The concern is what this demonstrates about everyone who is NOT Ian Carroll.

Front Gate's vulnerability existed before AI tools became widely available. But finding it the traditional way would have required more manual effort. According to Wired, Carroll was taken aback by how easily Claude came up with key elements of his technique. "I think there's a very good chance it could have found this exploit end-to-end without me doing anything at all," Carroll told Wired. AI dramatically lowers the skill floor for offensive security work, which cuts both ways: it helps researchers like Carroll find bugs faster, and it gives less scrupulous actors the same speed advantage.

Anthropically controlled access programs like the Cyber Verification Program exist precisely to manage that risk. Anthropic stated that if Carroll had not been part of the program, his use of Claude to hack Front Gate's systems would have been detected and blocked. Critics of those programs argue that having a major AI company serve as gatekeeper for who gets to do offensive security research creates a centralized chokepoint that is itself a potential vulnerability, and that the bar for inclusion is set by Anthropic, not by any independent body.

What Remains Open

Front Gate and Live Nation have not commented on whether they plan broader security audits of other systems within the Live Nation portfolio. Ticketmaster, the more prominent Live Nation ticketing subsidiary, handles consumer-facing ticket sales for large numbers of customers. Whether Carroll's technique, or variants of it, applied to adjacent Live Nation systems is an open question the company has not addressed publicly.