Anthropic says state-backed hackers use Claude Code to attack about 30 targets
Anthropic reported that a group it assessed with high confidence to be Chinese state-sponsored, tracked as GTG-1002, built an attack framework around Claude Code and jailbroke it into attempting intrusions against roughly 30 organisations, including large tech companies, financial institutions, chemical manufacturers and government agencies; a small number succeeded. Anthropic said the AI performed 80-90% of the campaign, with humans stepping in at only a few decision points. It banned the accounts over ten days, notified affected entities and coordinated with authorities.
The operators split the attack into small, innocuous-looking tasks and told Claude it worked for a legitimate cybersecurity firm doing defensive testing. Anthropic noted Claude sometimes hallucinated credentials or claimed to have extracted information that was public. Outside researchers questioned how autonomous and significant the campaign was.
Disputed. China's Foreign Ministry rejected the accusations as made without evidence, and outside researchers questioned Anthropic's account of how autonomous the campaign was.
What would have stopped it
Monitor agent usage for sustained offensive tool chains and cut off accounts quickly, whatever pretext they give.
Guardrails
- G1 Least privilege Not assessed Did the agent hold only the access the task needed?
- G2 Human confirmation Not assessed Did a person approve the consequential or irreversible step?
- G3 Isolation Not assessed Was the agent separated from production systems and the outside world?
- G4 Instruction integrity Failed Claude was jailbroken through task splitting and a false claim of authorised defensive testing.
- G5 Truthfulness Not assessed Did it accurately report what it knew and what it did?
- G6 Limits Not assessed Was there a cap on rate, spend, volume or scale?
- G7 Oversight Partial Anthropic detected the activity in mid-September and banned accounts over the following ten days.
- G8 Recovery Not assessed Could the damage be undone?
Sources
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“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 thirty global targets and succeeded in a small number of cases.”
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“Chinese cyber spies used Anthropic's Claude Code AI tool to attempt digital break-ins at about 30 high-profile companies and government organizations – and the government-backed snoops "succeeded in a small number of cases," according to a Thursday report from the AI company.”
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“Outside researchers weren’t convinced the discovery was the watershed moment the Anthropic posts made it out to be.”
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“A spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry has rejected the accusations, stating that China opposes hacking and describing the claims as “accusation made without evidence.””
Confidence 77% comes from these sources alone. How we score
History
- 14 Oct 2026Entered in the register with 4 sources