Artificial intelligence has removed the skill advantage that once set state-sponsored hackers apart from lone criminals, according to a threat report Anthropic published Thursday that documents misuse of its Claude models across seven areas of harm.
The report, which details activity observed between December 2025 and August 2026, covers cyber operations, influence operations, surveillance, scams and fraud, biological misuse, conventional weapons development and distillation. Anthropic said it disrupted each operation, strengthened safeguards and shared intelligence with authorities and industry partners where appropriate.
“The cases we share here aren’t typical misuse, but rather examples of the most notable and novel threat activity we’ve identified to date,” the report reads. “We’re publishing this work because we believe we have a responsibility to disclose malicious misuse of our services. As models become increasingly capable, their risks will increase, unless AI developers and society’s defenders act to make them safer.”
The cyber operations the company detailed were a Russian-aligned espionage campaign that hit more than 20 government and defense organizations across Ukraine and Europe, two Chinese undergraduates who ran an automated exploit foundry that produced more than a dozen potential zero-days in a single month, affiliates of the ShinyHunters crime collective who dumped 2,100 cloud access tokens across 40 corporate tenants in 34 hours, and a lone hacktivist who targeted European political parties via stolen API keys.
For decades, cybersecurity researchers and investigators have pointed to sophisticated operations as a signature of state-sponsored tradecraft, while crude intrusions suggested amateurs or petty criminals. Anthropic posits in the report that AI has erased that conventional thinking, especially since a “majority of the operations described in this report were enabled by AI via direct execution or orchestration.”
“For threat intelligence investigators, sophistication has stopped being a reliable signal of who is behind an operation,” the report said, adding that a hacktivist on stolen API keys, scattered criminals and a state espionage operator each ran campaigns that a year earlier “would have required many skilled operators and specialist knowledge.”
The most extensive case involved a malicious actor using the handle “JackPoterz” whose actions aligned with Russian state espionage, matching behaviors linked to Midnight Blizzard.
According to the report, the actor employed a custom toolkit composed of two families of Windows-based implants, a mobile exploitation kit, a credential stealing tool that targets browser password stores, a phishing platform designed to mimic priority targets like government organizations, and an administrative console used to manage compromised accounts. Targets included military intelligence bodies in Ukrainian and European governments, diplomatic and defense organizations, and people connected to U.S. foreign policy.
According to the report, AI monitored whether security products flagged the actor’s malware. When a detection occurred, “agents would then set about the process of autonomously modifying and rebuilding the malware to evade the existing detections,” the report said.