Anthropic said Thursday it shut down multiple cases of state-sponsored surveillance operations that used its artificial intelligence (AI) models, and warned that governments and state-aligned actors are increasingly using AI to spy on ethnic minorities and dissidents.
Surveillance Campaigns Target Dissident Communities Worldwide
Between January and July, Anthropic reported that surveillance campaigns were discovered and disrupted, originating from China, Iran, and West Africa. These operations specifically targeted diaspora and dissident communities, including pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong, Tibetan and Falun Gong groups across Asia, as well as Iranian minority communities and opponents of the Iranian regime abroad. The report highlights a continuity in targeting by these regimes, aiming at groups they have historically oppressed.
In one case, Iranian actors developed a way to identify people through their social media accounts; in another, a contractor working for Malian national security authorities used Claude “to design the underlying software that enabled the intelligence gathering. Anthropic also disrupted efforts by users to design weapons, conduct questionable biological research, and create dating scams.
“AI is now being used in place of an engineering workforce,” the report said. The San Francisco-based AI lab also accused Chinese developers of deceptively using Claude to produce responses to user queries while simultaneously “distilling” that data to improve their own models.
Distilling is an industry term that refers to a process where one AI model is used to train another one. Now Anthropic alleges that China’s Moonshot and Deepseek have also secretly used Claude to generate answers given to its users. Some of that data contained sensitive user information, potentially in violation of privacy agreements. Deepseek used similar techniques. When it comes to the research Anthropic detected and blocked that was related to biological weapons, the intent of the actors was less clear-cut and the AI lab did not identify them. “The individuals implicated in these case studies are working scientists.
“In one instance, over a ten-day period, Moonshot relayed almost 300,000 customer requests to Anthropic” through a “network of 5,380 fraudulent accounts, most of which appeared to be located in Singapore and Japan,” the report said. “We do not know if Moonshot notified their customers that their requests were being rerouted to Anthropic and exposed to a third party,” the report said. We do not assert that they intended harm, and identifying them or their labs could expose them to harm,” the report said. The scientific research in those cases involved work around the mosquito-born chikungunya virus, a “highly-pathogenic” strain of the bird flu, a family of viruses that include smallpox and mpox, venoms and other toxins. (Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
Chinese developers have previously been accused of using that technique without permission, essentially stealing resources from American labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI.
