Anthropic IDs countries that used AI for spying

SAN FRANCISCO, United States (AFP) — Anthropic said Thursday it shut down multiple cases of state-sponsored surveillance operations that used its artificial intelligence models, and warned that governments and state-aligned actors are increasingly using AI to spy on ethnic minorities and dissidents.

The incidents were found and disrupted between January and July, and they originated in China, Iran and west Africa, Anthropic said in a report about misuse of its models.

These surveillance campaigns “targeted the same diaspora and dissident communities these regimes have historically targeted. These include pro-democracy figures in Hong Kong, Tibetan and Falun Gong communities across Asia, and Iranian minority communities and opponents of the Iranian regime abroad,” the report said.

In one case, Iranian actors developed a way to identify people through their social media accounts; in another, a contractor working for Malian national security authorities used Claude “to design the underlying software that enabled the intelligence gathering.”

“AI is now being used in place of an engineering workforce,” the report said.

Anthropic also disrupted efforts by users to design weapons, conduct questionable biological research and create dating scams.

The San Francisco-based AI lab also accused Chinese developers of deceptively using Claude to produce responses to user queries while simultaneously “distilling” that data to improve their own models.