Russia: Claude was used to build software intended to power autonomous “kamikaze” drones.
The drone swarm was programmed to pick its own targets and crash into them to detonate, without a human making the final call.
In their programming, the team repeatedly picked a location in Ukraine’s Donetsk region as their target and used VPNs to circumvent Anthropic’s geographic blocks.
The developers claimed to have received funding from Russian government and military research programmes, though Anthropic assessed the group as a small freelance team rather than an official operation.
Yemen: A group in northern Yemen used Claude Code to help build weapons.
It helped design software for a guided rocket, drew up plans for a long-range missile, and helped develop an even faster type of weapon called a hypersonic glide vehicle.
Anthropic says there’s no proof they finished a working weapon, but the group test-fired one rocket. It apparently failed, because they went back to the AI afterwards asking it to help figure out what went wrong.
France: Anthropic traced a fake news operation to LKM Company, a French advertising agency.
Using Claude, it mass-produced political articles on about 70 fake news websites in about 20 languages – publishing at least 8913 stories.
Each site was given a made-up journalist’s byline and a fake Twitter/X account, boosted by hundreds of fake accounts posting comments meant to look like real people.
The operation flipped its message depending on who was paying, selling what Anthropic called “propaganda as a service”.
It targeted the US, Brazil and France, and did a lot of work on the Democratic Republic of the Congo, generally favouring the DRC’s side in its conflict with Rwanda.
UAE: A UAE-linked influence operation targeted the Muslim Brotherhood and United Nations experts critical of Abu Dhabi’s alleged role in war-ravaged Sudan.
The operation used Claude to generate reports, advocacy materials, social media content and testimony on Sudan – calling for “a co-ordinated transatlantic and regional operation to dismantle the Muslim Brotherhood globally”.
The operation also ghost-wrote official testimonies intended for delivery at the 62nd session of the UN Human Rights Council, drafting them under “specific restrictions” that the speeches not mention the UAE.
China: A China-based app studio built a network of more than 20 dating apps that claimed to be staffed by real people but were secretly run by Claude.
Over just two weeks in April 2026, Anthropic found more than 4700 Claude-powered AI characters chatting with at least 25,000 real users, sending about 2.36 million messages in total.
To seem more believable, real human workers were mixed in with the bots – about one human for every three AI personas – handling things the AI couldn’t, like video calls.
– AFP