Anthropic reveals what it believes is the first documented large-scale cyber intrusion carried out predominantly by AI systems, rather than human operators.
In a new report, Anthropic says it uncovered a “highly sophisticated” cyber espionage campaign conducted by a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group.
The firm says it detected the attack in mid-September when it saw suspicious activity tied to its Claude Code tool.
“The attackers used AI’s ‘agentic’ capabilities to an unprecedented degree—using AI not just as an advisor, but to execute the cyberattacks themselves.
The threat actor—whom we assess with high confidence was a Chinese state-sponsored group—manipulated our Claude Code tool into attempting infiltration into roughly 30 global targets and succeeded in a small number of cases. The operation targeted large tech companies, financial institutions, chemical manufacturing companies, and government agencies.”
Anthropic notes that the AI systems involved completed the majority of the operational work, including reconnaissance, vulnerability testing, credential harvesting and private data exfiltration.
“Overall, the threat actor was able to use AI to perform 80-90% of the campaign, with human intervention required only sporadically…”
The startup warns that the case shows a dramatic shift toward fully autonomous cyber operations that can scale faster and require fewer trained human operators.
“The sheer amount of work performed by the AI would have taken vast amounts of time for a human team. The AI made thousands of requests per second—an attack speed that would have been, for human hackers, simply impossible to match.”
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