Anthropic announced that it disrupted what it calls the first documented large-scale cyber-espionage campaign primarily executed by an AI system.
A Chinese state-sponsored threat actor manipulated Claude Code into acting as an autonomous cyber-operations agent by breaking malicious intent into harmless-looking subtasks.
The AI conducted reconnaissance, vulnerability scanning, exploit generation, credential harvesting, and data exfiltration with minimal human intervention, completing around 80–90% of the attack workflow. The operation targeted nearly 30 organisations worldwide. Anthropic warns that this event signals a new era in cyberwarfare, where AI agents significantly lower the skill and resource barrier for sophisticated attacks.
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