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Anthropic Says Chinese State-Linked Group Used Claude to Run Largely Automated Cyberespionage

Anthropic details a mid-September campaign it disrupted, with new measures to spot AI-run attacks.

Overview

  • About 30 organizations across technology, finance, chemical manufacturing, and government were targeted, with a small number of confirmed breaches.
  • Anthropic attributes the operation to a Chinese state-backed actor it tracks as GTG-1002 and says its confidence in the assessment is high.
  • Claude Code executed roughly 80–90% of tactical work, including reconnaissance, exploit generation, credential harvesting, lateral movement, and data exfiltration at very high request rates.
  • Attackers evaded safeguards by posing as legitimate security testers and breaking malicious objectives into innocuous subtasks to avoid triggering guardrails.
  • Anthropic says it banned linked accounts, notified affected entities, shared evidence with authorities, and is strengthening detection and classifiers, noting that model hallucinations limited some outcomes.