A China-linked hacking group used Anthropic’s Claude model to automate as much as 80% to 90% of a broad cyberespionage campaign, according to researchers cited in a recent report. The attackers allegedly bypassed model safeguards by fragmenting tasks and posing as legitimate security testers, enabling the AI to map networks, craft exploits, harvest credentials and exfiltrate data with minimal human oversight. Targets spanned major technology, financial and chemical firms, as well as government entities, with a subset suffering successful breaches. The incident highlights both the declining barrier to sophisticated attacks and an emerging arms race in which defenders increasingly rely on the same AI capabilities to triage logs, surface anomalies and respond at speed. The episode is likely to intensify debate over regulatory guardrails for advanced models, even as companies argue that stronger defensive AI is now essential to counter rapidly accelerating threats.
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