China, Iran among countries that have used AI to aid spying, Anthropic says
Anthropic has reported that state-sponsored actors from China, Iran, and West Africa have misused its AI models for surveillance and intelligence gathering. The company has taken steps to disrupt these campaigns, which targeted dissidents and diaspora communities.
Why it matters
This highlights the growing security risks associated with the dual-use nature of generative AI and the challenges tech companies face in preventing state-level exploitation of their platforms.
Anthropic said Thursday it shut down multiple cases of state-sponsored surveillance operations that used its artificial intelligence (AI) models, and warned that governments and state-aligned actors are increasingly using AI to spy on ethnic minorities and dissidents.
The incidents were found and disrupted between January and July, and they originated in China, Iran and west Africa, Anthropic said in a report about misuse of its models.
These surveillance campaigns "targeted the same diaspora and dissident communities these regimes have historically targeted. These include pro-democracy figures in Hong Kong, Tibetan and Falun Gong communities across Asia, and Iranian minority communities and opponents of the Iranian regime abroad," the report said.
In one case, Iranian actors developed a way to identify people through their social media accounts; in another, a contractor working for Malian national security authorities used Claude "to design the underlying software that enabled the intelligence gathering."
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