On November 13, 2025, Anthropic, the developer of an artificial intelligence model (“AI”) known as Claude, announced that it had detected and helped disrupt what it believes to be the first cyber espionage campaign orchestrated primarily by autonomous AI agents.1 Anthropic stated that it had “high confidence” that the campaign was orchestrated by a state-sponsored group, and described the campaign as a “significant escalation” in the evolution of cybersecurity threats. Like the artificial intelligence in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, AI technology is now able to automate and assist complex attacks on a large scale, and lowers the barrier to sophisticated hacking of computer systems. The incident is a reminder of the risks to both the developers of these technologies, and the businesses and individuals whose data may be at risk from malicious use of AI.
Summary of the Incident
In mid-September 2025, Anthropic’s Threat Intelligence team discovered suspicious activity that was later traced to a Chinese state-sponsored group they designated as “GTG-100.”2 GTG-1002 had used social engineering and “jailbreaking” techniques to manipulate Claude Code developer tool into executing cyberattacks. Specifically, human actors convinced Claude to assist in the attack by posing as employees of a cybersecurity firm engaged in defensive testing and breaking the larger campaign down into smaller steps that standing alone, seemed innocuous and concealed their offensive purpose.3
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