By Aisha Down
Publication Date: 2025-11-14 16:27:00
A leading artificial intelligence company claims to have stopped a China-backed “cyber espionage” campaign that was able to infiltrate financial firms and government agencies with almost no human oversight.
US-based Anthropic said its coding tool Claude Code was “manipulated” by a Chinese state-backed group to attack 30 companies around the world in September, achieving “a handful of successful breaches”.
This is a “significant escalation” compared to previous AI-powered attacks the company has seen, the company wrote in a blog post on Thursday, because Claude operated largely independently: 80 to 90% of the operations involved in the attack were carried out without human involvement.
“The actor has achieved what we believe is the first documented case of a large-scale cyberattack carried out largely without human intervention,” it said.
Anthropic did not clarify which financial institutions and government agencies were attacked or what exactly the hackers achieved – although it…
