AI Assistants Being Used for Scams, Weapons Development and Fraud: Report

Threat actors – suspected state-sponsored groups, financially motivated criminals, and commercial spyware vendors, among others – are leverage AI assistants, particularly Anthropic’s Claude, for malicious activity.

Anthropic says they disrupted the activity, strengthened safeguards, and shared intelligence with authorities and industry partners, where appropriate.  The cases range from a network of fake dating apps designed to defraud users to surveillance systems built to identify and monitor dissidents.

Between December 2025 and August 2026, it disrupted seven harm areas: cyber operations, influence operations, surveillance, scams and fraud, biological misuse, conventional weapons development, and distillation.

Anthropic highlighted in its report that Claude Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus models were used. None of the misuse cases involved the use of Claude Fable or Mythos-class models, with the exception of one illicit distillation case.

The cases are examples of the most notable and novel threat activity to date.

The risk from AI adoption is more pronounced across the cyber kill chain, where adversaries can operate faster, across a broader and deeper surface area, with fewer resources.

AI Attack Targets

Anthropic says the cybersecurity skills of AI models mean that AI has collapsed the labor and tooling gap that used to separate well-resourced, state-sponsored operations from individual operators.

Sophistication has stopped being a reliable signal of who is behind an operation. Every layer of offensive operations has been uplifted by AI, from reconnaissance and tool development to data processing and exploitation. 

The report highlights more than 20 distinct organizations targeted in the actor’s operational planning, reconnaissance, and live operations. They included government ministries, defense and intelligence bodies, embassies and diplomatic missions, think tanks, and defense-industrial companies, concentrated in Ukraine and Europe but extending to the Middle East and maritime related government agencies in Asia. 

The most commonly recurring targets were members of the Ukrainian government, military, and diplomatic staff. A secondary recurring target for theft was drone supply chain technology. 

Anthropic has identified multiple threat actors who have effectively established automated exploit foundries with AI. 

Bad Actors Use AI Assistants as Tools

Threat actors have designed and implemented autonomous workflows by which they can direct Claude to conduct vulnerability and exploit research agentically around the clock. 

Claude is being used to accelerate the pace of vulnerability research, testing, and exploit design. The operators routinely ran agent swarms, where a lead AI agent decomposed reconnaissance and post-exploitation work and dispatched it to many subagents running in parallel.

There have been cases where a criminal AI supply chain established a range of pathways to farm victim API keys and session tokens. One such approach involved masquerading as real AI service providers to deliver malware. 

The actor stood up websites that purported to be an intermediary service between multiple AI models and offered discounted access to frontier AI models.

Site visitors would be compromised in a variety of ways, the most persistent one was by having the victims download and install malicious client-side applications often spoofing as popular AI harnesses including Claude Code but were in fact credential harvesters that would gather all of the victim’s credentials and authenticated session tokens on their device and send them to the attacker. 

And the report goes on….

To sum it up, this is just Anthropic – the creator Claude – identifying loopholes in its AI assistant. There are numerous AI assistants (Chatgpt, DeepSeek,  creators out there. The world wide web is full of it.

The question is how to stop AI from misuse. AI assistant creators or companies are brewing trouble.

The analogy is uncomfortable but revealing give and take – it is like a cocaine supplier continuing to produce and distribute the drug while offering governments tools to combat the very trafficking and addiction its own business helps sustain.

Also Read: AI Agents Could Outnumber Human Workers Globally by 2029