Claude Used to Automate Exploitation and Data Theft Across Multiple Victims

Anthropic has warned that cybercriminals and state-sponsored hackers alike are using its Claude models for cyber attacks, weapons design, propaganda, and mass surveillance between December 2025 and August 2026.

The threat actors, which the artificial intelligence (AI) company has branded Generative Threat Groups (GTGs), span state-sponsored groups, financially motivated criminals, commercial spyware vendors, state propaganda institutions, and politically motivated individuals.

"The cybersecurity skills of AI models means that AI has collapsed the labor and tooling gap that used to separate well-resourced, state-sponsored operations from individual operators," Anthropicsaid. "The use of AI went beyond simple questions and responses from a chatbot but rather involved the use of multi-agent frameworks executing reconnaissance, exploitation, and data exfiltration."

Among the notable cases highlighted by Anthropic is the development of an AI-assisted workflow by a Russian state-sponsored threat actor it callsGTG-20006, which shares tactical and tradecraft overlaps with a Russian advanced persistent threat (APT) group tracked as Midnight Blizzard (aka APT29 and Cozy Bear). Some of the other AI-enabled cyber campaigns highlighted by Anthropic in its 154-page report include -

"At one end, actors used Claude conversationally: it acted as an engineering assistant in the creation of malware, phishing kits, and surveillance tooling," Anthropic said. "Further along the spectrum, threat actors directed Claude to execute operations (such as running commands against victim networks, harvesting credentials, and exfiltrating data) with a human making each individual targeting decision (GTG-20006)."

"At the far end, operations ran autonomously, with minimal human input or supervision: these included multi-agent frameworks conducting reconnaissance, exploitation, and theft against multiple victims, in parallel, for hours or days at a time (GTG-50014, GTG-50020, GTG-50029)."

The AI company said it also identified and took down a number of influence operations in which Claude played the role of a "sub-editor or content creator" to churn out content and run them at a scale beyond what low-resourced actors could have accomplished on their own. However, Anthropic emphasized that none of these efforts amassed authentic engagement and that they were disrupted before they could even build an audience.

Some of the influence and surveillance campaign clusters flagged by Anthropic at a high level are below -

Elsewhere, Anthropic said it neutralized Claude misuse efforts by threat actors based in northern Yemen to develop guided weapons, two China-based operations to draft a Chinese-language specification for an anti-torpedo fire control system and build targeting software for electronic warfare, and a Russia-based operation to engineer a full-stack autonomous first-person-view (FPV) kamikaze drone swarm.

"As AI models become more widely used, providers will continue to acquire threat-relevant visibility into real-world use that even governments and intergovernmental organizations lack," the company said. "We hope that sharing these early insights with the public helps inform governments, the industry, and the general public on the nature of these risks, and the safeguards that are necessary for ensuring the safe deployment of AI models."