Anthropic disrupts Russian, Chinese AI campaigns targeting its Claude models

Anthropic says it disrupted several alleged malicious uses of its Claude models over eight months, including a suspected Russia-linked cyber‑espionage campaign and efforts by China‑based labs to extract and copy Claude’s capabilities.
The company alleges massive “illicit distillation” activity—operators tied to Alibaba ran what Anthropic called the largest extraction effort, logging some 151 million exchanges between May and July 2026.
Anthropic also reported a Russia‑linked group (consistent with Midnight Blizzard) using AI to automate phishing, hotel Wi‑Fi hijacks and WhatsApp takeovers for attacks on Ukrainian targets, even auto‑rewriting malware to evade defenses.