Iran used Claude to target US Navy in Middle East, Anthropic says

A major artificial intelligence company said that Iranian bad actors used its publicly accessible software to target U.S. service members in the Middle East.

The Thursday Anthropic report covers the time period between December 2025 and August 2026 and highlights the misuse of its large language model Claude, which it says the threat actor used to make targeting recommendations against U.S. Navy forces in the region.

“The threat actor used Claude to compile targeting handbooks…to identify and track naval positions based on open-source information,” the report said.

The bad actor used the AI software to collect information that included a list of U.S. service members it had sourced from public military photographs, ship and aircraft transponders — which broadcast a specific code that identifies them — commercial satellite-imagery query scripts that help locate exact geographic visuals, and a breakdown of public websites that track U.S. Navy movements.