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A leading artificial intelligence company claims to have stopped a China-backed \u201ccyber espionage\u201d campaign that was able to infiltrate financial firms and government agencies with almost no human oversight.<\/p>\n
The US-based Anthropic said its coding tool, Claude Code, was \u201cmanipulated\u201d by a Chinese state-sponsored group to attack 30 entities around the world in September, achieving a \u201chandful of successful intrusions\u201d.<\/p>\n
This was a \u201csignificant escalation\u201d from previous AI-enabled attacks it monitored, it wrote in a blogpost on Thursday, because Claude acted largely independently: 80 to 90% of the operations involved in the attack were performed without a human in the loop.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe actor achieved what we believe is the first documented case of a cyber-attack largely executed without human intervention at scale,\u201d it wrote.<\/p>\n
Anthropic did not clarify which financial institutions and government agencies had been targeted, or what exactly the hackers had achieved \u2013 although it did say they were able to access their targets\u2019 internal data.<\/p>\n
It said Claude had made numerous mistakes in executing the attacks, at times making up facts about its targets, or claiming to have \u201cdiscovered\u201d information that was free to access.<\/p>\n
Policymakers and some experts said the findings were an unsettling sign of how capable certain AI systems have grown: tools such as Claude are now able to work independently over longer periods of time.<\/p>\n