Anthropic details cyber espionage campaign orchestrated by AI

Security leaders face a brand new class of autonomous menace as Anthropic details the primary cyber espionage campaign orchestrated by AI.

In a report launched this week, the corporate’s Threat Intelligence crew outlined its disruption of a complicated operation by a Chinese state-sponsored group – an evaluation made with excessive confidence – dubbed GTG-1002 and detected in mid-September 2025.

The operation focused roughly 30 entities, together with massive tech corporations, monetary establishments, chemical manufacturing corporations, and authorities companies.

Rather than AI aiding human operators, the attackers efficiently manipulated Anthropic’s Claude Code mannequin to perform as an autonomous agent to execute the overwhelming majority of tactical operations independently.

This marks a worrying improvement for CISOs, shifting cyber assaults from human-directed efforts to a mannequin the place AI brokers carry out 80-90 % of the offensive work with people appearing solely as high-level supervisors. Anthropic believes that is the primary documented case of a large-scale cyberattack executed with out substantial human intervention.

AI brokers: A brand new operational mannequin for cyberattacks

The group used an orchestration system that tasked situations of Claude Code to perform as autonomous penetration testing brokers. These AI brokers have been directed as a part of the espionage campaign to carry out reconnaissance, uncover vulnerabilities, develop exploits, harvest credentials, transfer laterally throughout networks, and exfiltrate knowledge. This enabled the AI to carry out reconnaissance in a fraction of the time it will have taken a crew of human hackers.

Human involvement was restricted to 10-20 % of the entire effort, primarily centered on campaign initiation and offering authorisation at a couple of key escalation factors. For instance, human operators would approve the transition from reconnaissance to lively exploitation or authorise the ultimate scope of knowledge exfiltration.

The attackers bypassed the AI mannequin’s built-in safeguards, that are educated to keep away from dangerous behaviours. They did this by jailbreaking the mannequin, tricking it by breaking down assaults into seemingly harmless duties and by adopting a “role-play” persona. Operators instructed Claude that it was an worker of a professional cybersecurity agency and was being utilized in defensive testing. This allowed the operation to proceed lengthy sufficient to achieve entry to a handful of validated targets.

The technical sophistication of the assault lay not in novel malware, however in orchestration. The report notes the framework relied “overwhelmingly on open-source penetration testing instruments”. The attackers used Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers as an interface between the AI and these commodity instruments, enabling the AI to execute instructions, analyse outcomes, and keep operational state throughout a number of targets and periods. The AI was even directed to analysis and write its personal exploit code for the espionage campaign.

AI hallucinations develop into a very good factor

While the campaign efficiently breached high-value targets, Anthropic’s investigation uncovered a noteworthy limitation: the AI hallucinated throughout offensive operations.

The report states that Claude “regularly overstated findings and infrequently fabricated knowledge”. This manifested because the AI claiming to have obtained credentials that didn’t work or figuring out discoveries that “proved to be publicly accessible data.”

This tendency required the human operators to fastidiously validate all outcomes, presenting challenges for the attackers’ operational effectiveness. According to Anthropic, this “stays an impediment to totally autonomous cyberattacks”. For safety leaders, this highlights a possible weak spot in AI-driven assaults: they might generate a excessive quantity of noise and false positives that may be recognized with sturdy monitoring.

A defensive AI arms race towards new cyber espionage threats

The major implication for enterprise and expertise leaders is that the limitations to performing refined cyberattacks have dropped significantly. Groups with fewer assets might now be capable of execute campaigns that beforehand required total groups of skilled hackers.

This assault demonstrates a functionality past “vibe hacking,” the place people remained firmly in command of operations. The GTG-1002 campaign proves that AI can be utilized to autonomously uncover and exploit vulnerabilities in reside operations.

Anthropic, which banned the accounts and notified authorities over a ten-day investigation, argues that this improvement reveals the pressing want for AI-powered defence. The firm states that “the very skills that enable Claude for use in these assaults additionally make it important for cyber protection”. The firm’s personal Threat Intelligence crew “used Claude extensively to analyse “the large quantities of knowledge generated” throughout this investigation.

Security groups ought to function beneath the idea {that a} main change has occurred in cybersecurity. The report urges defenders to “experiment with making use of AI for protection in areas like SOC automation, menace detection, vulnerability evaluation, and incident response.”

The contest between AI-driven assaults and AI-powered defence has begun, and proactive adaptation to counter new espionage threats is the one viable path ahead.

See additionally: Wiz: Security lapses emerge amid the global AI race

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