Sept 10 (Reuters) – Anthropic on Thursday said it had disrupted several allegedly malicious uses of its Claude models over the past eight months, including a suspected Russia-linked cyber espionage campaign and efforts by Chinese AI firms it accused of trying to extract and replicate Claude’s capabilities.
Cybercriminals and state-backed hackers were increasingly using AI not just to assist with tasks but to orchestrate and execute large portions of cyberattacks, Anthropic said in its latest Threat Intelligence report. It added that humans were often overseers rather than hands-on operators.
“The use of AI went beyond simple questions and responses from a chatbot but rather involved the use of multi-agent frameworks executing” tasks, Anthropic said.
Anthropic said it had disrupted attacks from seven China-based labs during that period. Among the labs Anthropic named were tech giant Alibaba, Moonshot, DeepSeek and Xiaomi.
Operators it linked to Alibaba ran what Anthropic called the largest “illicit distillation” attack, allegedly aimed at extracting capabilities of Claude models and using them to improve the Chinese tech firm’s Qwen models, the company said. Alibaba did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Anthropic said it observed more than 151 million exchanges it attributed to Alibaba between May and July 2026, peaking at nearly 3 million per day from more than 3,500 accounts it described as fraudulent.
Distillation refers to the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive models in a bid to lower the costs of training a new AI tool.
Rather than running bulk queries, Kimi chatbot creator Moonshot and DeepSeek allegedly routed live customer conversations, which sometimes included sensitive information, through Claude and used its responses as training data, Anthropic alleged.
A hacking group whose tradecraft was consistent with Russia-based threat actor Midnight Blizzard allegedly ran phishing, hotel Wi-Fi hijacking and WhatsApp-takeover operations against targets in the Ukrainian government, military and diplomatic sectors, using AI at nearly every stage, Anthropic said.
The U.S. government has previously linked Midnight Blizzard, a tracking term coined by Microsoft, to Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service. The Russian Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The group allegedly used AI to build a system that automatically detected when its malware was flagged by security defenses and rewrote the code until it evaded detection again.
Anthropic also identified what it called “new categories of threat actors” misusing Claude, including those using the platform to “develop software for conventional weapons, including firearms, missiles, armed drones, bombs, and other munitions, as well as the targeting and control systems that operate them.” The report detailed incidents of operators using Claude to develop software for weapons design and development, or to support intelligence gathering and procurement related to weapons programs, in China, Russia, and Yemen.
The company said that it detected and disrupted activity linked to affiliates of the ShinyHunters cybercrime collective, one of the most prolific cybercrime enterprises in recent months linked to attacks on major corporations around the world.
Jacob Klein, head of threat intelligence at Anthropic, said in an interview that models have become more capable over the last year, raising new risks. “A year ago, let’s say you wanted to optimize a drone or optimize the software on a missile, the models just wouldn’t be as good at that task as they are now,” he said.
(Reporting by Prathik Jayaprakash in Bengaluru, AJ Vicens in Detroit, and Karen Freifeld in New York; Editing by Tasim Zahid and David Gregorio)
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