China, Iran used AI in surveillance operations, Anthropic says

Anthropic said it had disrupted multiple state-sponsored surveillance operations that used its artificial intelligence (AI) models for intelligence gathering, with cases linked to China, Iran and West Africa.

The US-based AI company said the incidents were identified and disrupted between January and July. It said the campaigns targeted diaspora and dissident communities, including pro-democracy figures in Hong Kong, Tibetan and Falun Gong communities in Asia, and Iranian minorities and opponents of the Iranian government abroad.

In one case, Iranian actors developed a method to identify people through their social media accounts, Anthropic said.

In another case, a contractor working for Malian national security authorities used Anthropic's Claude AI model to design software for intelligence gathering.

"AI is now being used in place of an engineering workforce," Anthropic said in a report detailing misuse of its models.

The company also said it had disrupted attempts to use its models to design weapons, conduct potentially harmful biological research and facilitate dating scams.

Anthropic further accused Chinese developers of using Claude to generate responses for users while collecting the resulting data to train their own AI models, a process known as distillation.

The company alleged that Chinese AI firms Moonshot and DeepSeek had secretly used Claude in this way.

According to Anthropic, Moonshot relayed nearly 300,000 customer requests to the company over a 10-day period through a network of 5,380 fraudulent accounts, most of which appeared to be based in Singapore and Japan.