Government of Alberta Scales Security Review with Claude, Scanning 466M Lines of Code in 20 Hours

Summary

The Government of Alberta's Ministry of Technology and Innovation has successfully deployed Claude Code to conduct a comprehensive security audit across its systems. Since 2025, the ministry has used Claude with both Opus and Sonnet models to scan 466 million lines of code across 1,280 applications and 3,400 code repositories in just 20 hours—work that would have taken approximately 6.5 years using traditional security review methods. The initiative identified vulnerabilities that existing automated security tools had missed.

Using approximately 50 autonomous agents working in parallel, Claude Code employed a two-stage approach: first flagging known security patterns with a rules engine, then reviewing those flags with precise citations for developers to verify. Where vulnerabilities were found, Claude generated fixes, wrote tests, and even rebuilt aging legacy systems in modern languages. All changes were reviewed and approved by the ministry's engineering team before deployment. One subsidy portal originally hand-coded in Java 25 years ago was rebuilt in four to five days, compared to the original five-month development timeline.

Alberta's Ministry maintains systems for all 27 provincial ministries and handles highly sensitive information including tax records, government procurement data, and social services case files. The ministry has also built specialized Claude review agents for continuous security monitoring throughout the development process and published technical white papers documenting its approach to help other governments implement similar programs.

• Alberta published white papers documenting its AI-assisted security approach for other government agencies to adopt