A new threat intelligence report from Anthropic shows how state-linked engineers in Yemen, China and Russia tried to turn a chatbot into a weapons contractor, and how a request tied to smallpox-family virus research slipped past the company's safety filters. For eight months, a small team inside Anthropic sat quietly watching some of the world's most dangerous people type into a chatbot.
Not hackers looking to steal passwords. Not scammers running fake dating profiles, though there were plenty of those too. This was something colder: engineers building missiles. A cell working on torpedo defense systems for the Chinese navy. A freelance crew in Russia wiring up autonomous kamikaze drones. And, buried inside a pile of "legitimate research" requests, a grant application for a virus from the same family as smallpox.
