Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, just published a report detailing how its agentic coding tool was used in a cyberattack that targeted 30 institutions, including tech, finance, and chemical manufacturing companies, plus some government agencies. The company alleges that a Chinese state-sponsored group was behind the campaign, and that it used a jailbroken version of Claude to conduct the sophisticated attack. According to Anthropic, this is the first time an AI-orchestrated cyber attack has been reported.
The company says that although AI with agentic capabilities has increased its usefulness in productivity-related tasks, it has also allowed bad actors to take advantage of AI tools to execute complicated attacks without needing constant human supervision. Although LLMs typically have built-in safeguards to prevent them from being used in criminal acts, the recent event showed that there are ways to circumvent this.
