AI's scary new trick: Conducting cyberattacks instead of just helping out

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ZDNET's key takeaways

• Anthropic documented a large-scale cyberattack using AI.
• Anthropic says that a Chinese state-sponsored group is to blame.
• The attack may be the first case of its kind. 

The first large-scale cyberattack campaign leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) as more than just a helping digital hand has now been recorded.

Also: Google spots malware in the wild that morphs mid-attack, thanks to AI

As first reported by the Wall Street Journal, Anthropic, the company behind Claude, an AI assistant, published a report (.PDF) documenting the abuse of its AI models, hijacked in a wide-scale attack campaign simultaneously targeting multiple organizations.

What happened?

In the middle of September, Anthropic detected a "highly sophisticated cyber espionage operation" that used AI throughout the full attack cycle. 

Claude Code, agentic AI, was abused in the creation of ...