Chinese State Hackers Jailbroke Claude AI Code for Automated Breaches

Anthropic, the developer behind Claude AI, says a Chinese state sponsored group used its model to automate most of a cyber espionage operation against about 30 companies with Claude handling up to 90% of the technical work.

The world of cybersecurity is changing fast, and a recent report from Anthropic, the company behind the AI model Claude, has revealed a problematic new chapter in cyberattacks. Suspected Chinese state-sponsored operators, reportedly, successfully used Anthropic’s AI coding tool, Claude Code, to target around 30 organisations globally, including major tech companies, financial institutions, chemical manufacturers, and government agencies.

A New Level of Automation

This campaign, detected starting in mid-September and investigated over the following ten days, is significant because it is the first documented case of a foreign government using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to fully automate a cyber operation. Previously, similar incidents, like one involving Russian military hackers targeting Ukrainian entities with ...