Chinese spies told Claude to break into about 30 critical orgs. Some attacks succeeded

Chinese cyber spies used Anthropic's Claude Code AI tool to attempt digital break-ins at about 30 high-profile companies and government organizations – and the government-backed snoops "succeeded in a small number of cases," according to a Thursday report from the AI company. The mid-September operation targeted large tech companies, financial institutions, chemical manufacturers, and government agencies. The threat actor was able to induce Claude to execute individual components of attack chains While a human selected the targets, "this marks the first documented case of agentic AI successfully obtaining access to confirmed high-value targets for intelligence collection, including major technology corporations and government agencies," Anthropic's threat hunters wrote in a 13-page document [PDF]. It's also further proof that attackers continue experimenting with AI to run their offensive operations. The incident also suggests heavily funded state-sponsored groups are getting better at autonomizing attacks. The AI vendor tracks the Chinese state-sponsored group behind the espionage campaign as GTG-1002, and says its operatives used Claude Code and Model Context Protocol (MCP) to run the attacks without a human in the tactical execution loop. A human-developed framework used Claude to orchestrate multi-stage attacks, which were then carried out by several Claude sub-agents all performing specific tasks. Those chores included mapping attack surfaces, scanning organizations' inf...