China, Iran among countries that have used AI to aid spying, Anthropic says

San Francisco — Anthropic revealed on Thursday that they had shut down several instances of state-backed spying operations utilizing their artificial intelligence (AI) models, and expressed concern over the growing utilization of AI by governments and state-linked entities to monitor ethnic minorities and dissidents. These occurrences were identified and halted between January and July, originating in China, Iran, and West Africa, according to a report on the misuse of Anthropic's models.

The surveillance campaigns primarily targeted the same diaspora and dissident communities that these regimes had previously monitored. This includes pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong, Tibetan and Falun Gong communities in Asia, as well as Iranian minority groups and critics of the Iranian regime living abroad, the report stated.

In one instance, Iranian operatives devised a method to identify individuals via their social media profiles; in another case, a contractor employed by Malian national security forces employed Anthropic's Claude AI to engineer the software facilitating intelligence gathering.

Anthropic noted that AI is now being deployed in the absence of a traditional engineering workforce.