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Anthropic AI claims to have thwarted multiple malicious operations using its Claude models, ranging from cyber-espionage and weapons design to mass surveillance campaigns.
On the conventional weapons front, the company alleges in a new report that it intervened in northern Yemen, blocking an effort to deploy Claude for missile guidance software, including a guided rocket and a long-range ballistic missile.
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AI-assisted missile and rocket development
According to Anthropic’s threat report, the operators used Claude “in place of human software engineers”, reportedly assigning different instances of the model specific roles to write missile-guidance and flight-control software.
While internal safeguards blocked many requests, Anthropic admitted several slipped through. The operators avoided detection by obscuring their ultimate goals and breaking tasks across separate sessions, so no single prompt gave away the operation.
The company said it has no evidence the group managed to field a working weapon, though Anthropic claimed the operators appeared to have conducted an unsuccessful test-fire.
The report stated that the company banned the accounts involved and “shared threat information with public- and private-sector partners to mitigate risks posed by the actors”.
State-linked cyber-espionage
The report alleges that a Russian-linked espionage operation bearing the hallmarks of Midnight Blizzard (or APT29), which Anthropic said relied on automated AI workflows to run nearly the entire operation, handling everything from phishing and setup to data theft against Ukrainian, European and diplomatic targets, including drone makers.
Separately, the company said it disrupted a Chinese operation run by university students in Hunan province, who used Claude “as the engineering and orchestration layer” of an offensive programme targeting government and corporate networks across the Middle East, Europe and Southeast Asia.
In both cases, Anthropic said it banned the associated accounts and deployed additional monitoring to detect similar activity.
Identifying targets, including in Syria and Iran
Anthropic also alleges that it identified and removed three Iranian state-aligned accounts using Claude to run covert influence and psychological operations. Each operation was tied to a named Iranian propaganda institution, including the Islamic Culture and Communications Organisation and a Mashhad seminary command room distributing content aligned with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ (IRGC) narratives.
In another instance, the report alleges that state-aligned groups used Claude for an industrial-scale operation, directing the model to generate structured profiles that mapped targets by location, demographics, political leanings, and confidence scores.
“The most operationally mature case,” Anthropic noted in its report, was detected when a China-aligned account “with no Arabic language skills” used Claude to run a “multi-day recruitment operation to infiltrate Uyghur targets in Syria”. Anthropic said, “the model drafted outreach in the regional dialect” and “translated replies in real time”.
Earlier this week, Anthropic revealed yet another incident of an AI model gaining unauthorised access to external systems involving an early version of Claude Opus 4.6, shortly after former company researcher Jacob Coxon publicly resigned over safety concerns.
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” Coxon warned in a post on X. A further Anthropic scientist, Evan Hubinger, later chimed in, saying Coxon was correct.
The researchers’ warnings have led a growing number of US lawmakers to call for new rules to govern AI systems.
Anthropic said it is investigating the recurring issues and breaches across the incidents and has engaged an independent research firm to review them.
Relationship with Washington
Relations between Washington and the AI company remain fraught following a contentious standoff over ethical guardrails. Earlier this year, the Pentagon blacklisted the company as a supply chain risk after it refused to drop safeguards against using its technology for autonomous weaponry and domestic surveillance.
Anthropic challenged the decision in California, where a judge ruled last month that the US Department of Defense had acted unlawfully in issuing the designation. Yet despite the bitter legal battle and public friction, the Pentagon has reportedly deployed the firm’s Claude models in military missions in Iran and Venezuela.
The report arrives at a critical juncture for the company as it seeks to restore full standing within the US defence industrial base following the Pentagon’s blacklisting.
