Anthropic Reveals How It Stopped ‘Kamikaze Drone’ Swarms, Biological Weapons And More

Anthropic unveiled its latest report detailing how it stopped bad actors from using its Claude artificial intelligence (AI) models for malicious activity.

Cases ranged from fake dating apps designed for fraud to surveillance systems meant to track dissidents, according to Anthropic’s Threat Intelligence Report. The report states that bad actors include “suspected state-sponsored groups, financially motivated criminals, commercial spyware vendors, state propaganda institutions, and politically motivated individuals.”

Anthropic emphasized that bad actors used Claude Haiku, Sonnet and Opus for malicious purposes and that its frontier models, Fable and Mythos, were not involved, save for one instance of trying to steal AI model data through a process known as “distillation.”

The report follows as an Anthropic researcher recently quit, saying that AI could potentially kill everyone by the end of the decade.

The AI company said it banned a group of Chinese accounts linked to Chinese state security organs used Anthropic’s AI to support “stability maintenance,” which is the Chinese Communist Party’s term for suppressing dissent. Anthropic identified another actor it believes is associated with a municipal cyber police unit that used Claude to run a domestic surveillance system, which identified 10 Chinese citizens as targets.

Many targets of this surveillance ranged from pro-democracy figures in Hong Kong, those that sought organize Tiananmen Square massacre commemorations, as well as advocates for Uyghurs and Western human rights groups.

Hong Kong remains a special administrative region (SAR) of China after the United Kingdom handed control over to the country in 1997. However, over the years, the Chinese mainland government cemented more control over Hong Kong’s somewhat-autonomous status, limiting freedom of expression and the press, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., did not immediately respond to a DCNF request for comment.

Anthropic said it also disrupted plots using AI to conduct research to develop biological weapons. It stated that it could not determine if this research was for a nefarious or legitimate purpose.