Hackers are stealing Claude tokens from subscribers

An independent AI consultant discovered that his Claude account was being drained of tokens by unauthorized third-party services. Anthropic confirmed the account was compromised via a session key, highlighting security risks for users relying on AI agents for business automation.
Why it matters
As businesses increasingly integrate AI agents into their workflows, session security and token theft represent emerging cybersecurity threats for professional users.
On August 4, Grant de Swardt, an independent AI consultant in East Sussex, UK, noticed something strange going on with his Claude Max 20x account. He hadn’t been working that day, yet his token usage was climbing.
The next day, he disabled everything he had attached to Claude and did not work with it. Token consumption again increased. “In the clearest controlled interval, it increased from 45% to 55% while I performed no work, scheduled Cowork tasks were paused or completed, Dispatch/cloud execution was disabled, and there was no corresponding active local Claude Code task,” de Swardt told TechCrunch.
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