Anthropic says China, Iran among countries deploying AI for spying

Anthropic said Thursday it disrupted multiple state-sponsored surveillance operations that used its artificial intelligence models, according to Vanguard. The AI lab said the incidents, uncovered between January and July, originated in China, Iran and west Africa, and targeted diaspora and dissident communities including pro-democracy figures in Hong Kong, Tibetan groups and Iranian dissidents abroad.

In one case, Iranian actors used the technology to identify individuals through social media, while a contractor for Malian security authorities used Claude to build surveillance software. Anthropic also accused Chinese firms Moonshot and Deepseek of covertly using Claude to generate responses for their own users while extracting the data to train competing models, in what it described as a breach of privacy agreements.