What happened

Chinese state-sponsored hackers used Anthropic's AI agent, Claude, to automate cyber espionage attacks against about thirty targets including large tech companies, financial institutions, chemical manufacturers, and government agencies, in a number of (unnamed) different countries. 

Orchestrated by a group designated as "GTG-1002", the attacks represent the first documented large-scale cyberattack conducted with minimal human intervention, where AI performed 80-90 percent of the hacking campaign tasks such as reconnaissance, vulnerability testing, exploit code generation, credential harvesting, installing backdoors, and data exfiltration. 

The hackers jailbroke Claude to bypass safety measures and split the attack into small, seemingly benign tasks, misleading the AI to act as if it were performing legitimate security testing. 

The AI agent operated at speeds unattainable by humans, making thousands of requests per second, and required human input only at approximately 4-6 critical decision points per campaign. 

The attackers reportedly succeeded in compromising several of their targets, removing large volumes of private and sensitive data, installing backdoors to maintain persistent unauthorised access, and leaving the affected organisations more exposed to data breaches and ongoing threats.

Anthropic discovered and disrupted the operation, banned compromised accounts, notified affected organizations, and coordinated with authorities while gathering intelligence. 

Why it happened

The attackers appear to have exploited gaps in Claude usage policies and weak monitoring of agent behaviour to prevent the repurposing of the system for offensive cyber operations.