China, Iran Among Countries Accused of Using AI for Surveillance
Anthropic says it has disrupted several state-sponsored surveillance operations that used its artificial intelligence models to gather intelligence on ethnic minorities, dissidents and political opponents. According to a report released by the San Francisco-based AI company, the incidents were detected and stopped between January and July and were linked to actors in China, Iran and West Africa. Anthropic said the campaigns targeted communities that have historically faced surveillance, including pro-democracy figures in Hong Kong, Tibetan and Falun Gong communities across Asia, as well as Iranian minorities and opponents of the Iranian government living abroad. In one case, Iranian actors allegedly developed a method for identifying individuals through their social media accounts, while a contractor working for Malian national security authorities reportedly used Claude to develop software supporting intelligence gathering. Anthropic said the cases show that AI is increasingly being used to perform tasks traditionally handled by teams of engineers. The company also said it disrupted attempts involving weapons development, questionable biological research and dating scams.
Anthropic also accused Chinese technology companies Moonshot and DeepSeek of secretly using Claude to generate responses for their own users while collecting the resulting data to improve their AI models through a process known as distillation. The company said that, in one case, Moonshot routed nearly 300,000 customer requests to Anthropic over a 10-day period through 5,380 fraudulent accounts, with most appearing to be based in Singapore and Japan. Anthropic said some of the requests contained sensitive user information and raised concerns over possible violations of privacy agreements, while noting that it could not determine whether Moonshot informed its customers that their requests were being sent to a third party. DeepSeek was also accused of employing similar methods. Separately, Anthropic said it detected research involving potentially dangerous biological agents, including chikungunya virus, a highly pathogenic strain of bird flu, viruses related to smallpox and mpox, as well as venoms and other toxins. However, the company said it had not established that the scientists involved intended to cause harm and withheld their identities to avoid exposing them or their institutions to potential danger.
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