Chinese Hackers Use Anthropic's AI to Launch Automated Cyber Espionage Campaign

State-sponsored threat actors from China used Anthropic’s AI technology to orchestrate automated cyber attacks as part of a highly sophisticated espionage campaign in mid-September 2025. The attackers used AI’s “agentic” capabilities to execute the attacks themselves, according to Anthropic, rather than relying solely on human operators.

The operation allegedly manipulated Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding tool, to target about 30 global organisations including large tech companies, financial institutions, chemical manufacturers and government agencies, with a subset of intrusions succeeding.

Anthropic said the threat actor turned Claude into an autonomous cyber attack agent to support reconnaissance, vulnerability discovery, exploitation, lateral movement, credential harvesting, data analysis and exfiltration, using Claude Code and Model Context Protocol tools to break down tasks for sub-agents.

The campaign, GTG-1002, marks the first documented instance of an AI-powered large-scale cyber attack conducted with limited human intervention, though it also highlighted AI’s tendency to hallucinate and fabricate data during autonomous operations as a key limitation.