Anthropic says it caught China using Claude to develop an anti-torpedo weapon
Anthropic has said that it caught China using Claude to help develop an anti-torpedo weapons system intended for the People’s Liberation Army Navy.
Anthropic said all that in an intelligence report about misuse of its models, published on Thursday. (REUTERS representative)The company also said that it shut down multiple cases of state-sponsored surveillance operations that used its artificial intelligence (AI) models, and warned that governments and state-aligned actors are increasingly using AI to spy on ethnic minorities and dissidents.
“We identified a China-based threat actor who used Claude to advance three parallel tracks of work on an anti-torpedo weapons system,” Anthropic said in an intelligence report about misuse of its models, published on Thursday.
According to the report, the actor used Claude to draft a Chinese-language specification for an anti-torpedo fire control system (the core logic that aims and times an anti-torpedo weapon’s response). It added that the document was written to win approval from a Chinese defence manufacturer, which would move the work on to technical certification and operational testing.
Second, the actor used Claude to produce a more than 200-page Chinese-language technical proposal, accompanied by an executive briefing deck. Third, the actor used Claude to benchmark their own system against specific US anti-torpedo and anti-submarine programs based on publicly accessible information, the company said.
The report added that the actor then generated a Chinese-language briefing on US Navy systems, based on open-source reporting. The actor presented itself as an original equipment manufacturer in the US defence sector.
“We assess that the actor was associated with the Chinese defence industry,” Anthropic said in the report.
Anthropic also said it shut down multiple cases of state-sponsored surveillance operations that used its AI models, and warned that governments and state-aligned actors are increasingly using AI to spy on ethnic minorities and dissidents.
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.
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