{"id":621265,"date":"2026-09-11T09:32:14","date_gmt":"2026-09-11T09:32:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/621265\/"},"modified":"2026-09-11T09:32:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-11T09:32:14","slug":"anthropic-stops-use-of-ai-model-over-bioweapon-concern","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/621265\/","title":{"rendered":"Anthropic stops use of AI model over bioweapon concern"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Anthropic has said it disrupted attempts to use its AI models in ways that could support the development of biological weapons.<\/p>\n<p>In a report titled &#8216;Detecting and countering misuse of AI&#8217;, the San Francisco-based AI company listed five case studies of potential biological misuse of its models which it says &#8220;is one of the most serious risks of frontier AI models&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>The scientific research in those case studies involved work around the mosquito-born chikungunya virus, a &#8220;highly-pathogenic&#8221; strain of the bird flu, a family of viruses that include smallpox and mpox, venoms and other toxins.<\/p>\n<p>In the examples identified, Anthropic said the actors circumvented controls imposed to prevent users from unsupported regions accessing their models, while the actors also &#8220;engaged in other efforts to obfuscate the purpose of their research to evade our safeguards&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;When we detected and investigated these cases, we banned the users&#8217; accounts and incorporated our investigative findings into our frontier model safeguards, enforcement, and threat intelligence processes to better prevent, detect, and disrupt these activities in the future,&#8221; the report said.<\/p>\n<p>Anthropic said the intent of the actors was not clear-cut and the AI lab did not identify them.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"The Anthropic AI logo is displayed on a mobile phone screen\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/00247937-614.jpg\"\/><br \/>\nAnthropic also accused Chinese companies of &#8216;distilling&#8217; Claude data to improve their own models<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The individuals implicated in these case studies are working scientists. We do not assert that they intended harm, and identifying them or their labs could expose them to harm,&#8221; the report said.<\/p>\n<p>Anthropic said its aim in sharing the examples is to &#8220;spark conversation within the AI industry, and with governments, about emerging biological risks and how best to counter them&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Anthropic says China, Iran used its AI to aid spying<\/p>\n<p>Also in the report, Anthropic said it shut down multiple cases of state-sponsored surveillance operations that used its AI models, and warned that governments and state-aligned actors are increasingly using AI to spy on ethnic minorities and dissidents.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>These surveillance campaigns &#8220;targeted the same diaspora and dissident communities these regimes have historically targeted&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;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,&#8221; the report said.<\/p>\n<p>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 &#8220;to design the underlying software that enabled the intelligence gathering&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"a photograph of the CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/002401d2-614.jpg\"\/><br \/>\nIn July, Claude CEO Dario Amodei called on the US government to support a coordinated slowdown in the development of advanced AI<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;AI is now being used in place of an engineering workforce,&#8221; the report said.<\/p>\n<p>Anthropic also disrupted efforts by users to design weapons and create dating scams.<\/p>\n<p>The San Francisco-based AI lab also accused Chinese developers of deceptively using Claude to produce responses to user queries while simultaneously &#8220;distilling&#8221; that data to improve their own models.<\/p>\n<p>Distilling is an industry term that refers to a process where one AI model is used to train another one.<\/p>\n<p>Chinese developers have previously been accused of using that technique without permission, essentially stealing resources from American labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI.<\/p>\n<p>Now Anthropic alleges that China&#8217;s Moonshot and Deepseek have also secretly used Claude to generate answers given to its users.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;In one instance, over a 10-day period, Moonshot relayed almost 300,000 customer requests to Anthropic&#8221; through a &#8220;network of 5,380 fraudulent accounts, most of which appeared to be located in Singapore and Japan,&#8221; the report said.<\/p>\n<p>Some of that data contained sensitive user information, potentially in violation of privacy agreements.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We do not know if Moonshot notified their customers that their requests were being rerouted to Anthropic and exposed to a third party,&#8221; the report said.<\/p>\n<p>Deepseek used similar techniques.<\/p>\n<p>Earlier this week, an artificial intelligence researcher who left OpenAI to join Anthropic has decided to leave the industry, accusing both US companies of &#8220;gambling with our lives&#8221; in the race to develop AI models capable of self-improvement.<\/p>\n<p>Additional reporting AFP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Anthropic has said it disrupted attempts to use its AI models in ways that could support the development&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":621266,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-621265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=621265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621265\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/621266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=621265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=621265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=621265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}