Latest Anthropic horror story chills with tales of kamikaze drone swarms and bioweapons research

The baddies have come a long way since November, when an earlier Anthropic report documented Chinese spies using Claude to automate digital intrusions and steal sensitive data at a handful of critical organizations. Now everyone from ShinyHunters to Russian freelancers is getting in on the illicit model usage. This is not to say that Anthropic – nor any other frontier AI lab – plans to slow down its model development or testing initiatives, or take responsibility when its AI commits crimes. It does, however, “hope that the findings in this report will help other developers recognize similar patterns on their own platforms, give governments and civil society a clearer view of how emerging threats take shape, and strengthen collective defenses.” The model maker’s latest very lengthy report on AI misuse covers activity Anthropic disrupted between December 2025 and August 2026 across seven “harm areas” where miscreants used – or attempted to use – Claude Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus models for evil.  These span cyber operations, influence operations, surveillance, scams and fraud, biological misuse, conventional weapons development, and distillation. Anthropic also noted that its most powerful Claude Fable or Mythos-class models weren’t used, except in one distillation case. Even without those most advanced systems, the case studies in the report highlight some pretty bad behavior. Autonomous cyberattacks For example, a Russian espionage crew that Anthropic tracks as GTG-20006 – the state-sponsored cyber espionage arm of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), also known as Midnight Blizzard, APT29, or Cozy Bear – increased the speed of its attacks . Anthropic identified more than 20 organizations targeted in these attacks, including embassies, think tanks, defense-industrial companies, and government, defense, and intelligence agencies across Ukraine, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa. “We observed GTG-20006 operate through customized AI-driven workflows that automated much of their operations from development, infrastructure acquisition, phishing, persistence through command and control, to data exfiltration,” Anthropic said. Meanwhile, “multiple clusters” linked to the data-theft-and-extortion gang ShinyHunters used Claude to scale their smash-and-grab operations. One of these involves users outside the US using Claude to develop software for conventional weapons – firearms, missiles, armed drones, bombs, and other munitions, plus targeting and control systems that operate them.  In its new report, the model maker shares details on six cases: three in China, two in Russia, and one in Yemen. In Yemen, a weapons development program used Claude instead of human software engineers to develop guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) software that steers and stabilizes a flying vehicle. “Our safeguards blocked many of their requests, but not all of them,” Anthropic says.  The same team used Claude to try to develop guided weapons.