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Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign

anthropic.com

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Re: Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign

#131

Post by CGamesPlay »

d_burfoot wrote: post #23

Wait a minute - the attackers were using the API to ask Claude for ways to run a cybercampaign, and it was only defeated because Anthropic was able to detect the malicious queries? What would have happened if they were using an open-source model running locally? Or a secret model built by the Chinese government? I just updated by P(Doom) by a significant margin.

> What would have happened if they were using an open-source model running locally? Or a secret model built by the Chinese government?

In all likelihood, the exact same thing that is actually happening right now in this reality.

That said, local models specifically are perhaps more difficult to install given their huge storage and compute requirements.

Re: Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign

#132

Post by lavezzi »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #12

If Anthropic should have prevented this, then logically they should’ve had guardrails. Right now you can write whatever code you want. But to those who advocate guardrails, keep in mind that you’re advocating a company to decide what code you are and aren’t allowed to write. Hopefully they’ll be able to add guardrails without e.g. preventing people from using these capabilities for fuzzing their own networks. The bes…

> If Anthropic should have prevented this, then logically they should’ve had guardrails. Right now you can write whatever code you want. But to those who advocate guardrails, keep in mind that you’re advocating a company to decide what code you are and aren’t allowed to write.

They do. Read the RSP or one of the model cards.

Not sure why you would write all of this without researching yourself what they already declare publicly that they do.

Re: Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign

#133

Post by tw1984 »

Chinese have their own coding agents on par with Claude Code, why would they use Claude Code? Also if such agents are useful, they could just FT/RL their own for such specific use case (cyber espionage campaign) and get far better performance.

This is basically an IQ test. It gives me the feeling that anthropic is literally implying that Chinese state backed hackers don't have access to be the best Chinese AI and had to use American ones.

Re: Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign

#134

Post by tw1984 »

yawnxyz wrote: post #8

so even Chinese state actors prefer Claude over Chinese models? edit: Claude: recommended by 4 of 5 state sponsored hackers

well, this is what anthropic wants you to believe.

all public benchmark results and user feedback paint a quite different picture. Chinese have coding agents on par with Claude Code, they could easily FT/RL to future improve its specific capability if they want, yet anthropic refuses to even acknowledge the reality.

Re: Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign

#135

Post by tw1984 »

synapsomorphy wrote: post #43
kenjackson wrote: post #36

Curious why they didn't use DeepSeek... They could've probably built one tuned for this type of campaign.

Chinese builders are not equal to Chinese hackers (even if the hackers are state sponsored). I doubt most companies would be interested in developing hacking tools. Hackers use the best tools available at their disposal, Claude is better than Deepseek. Hacking-tuned LLMs seems like a thing that might pop up in the future, but it takes a lot of resources. Why bother if you can just tell Claude it's doing legitimate wo…

> I doubt most companies would be interested in developing hacking tools.

welcome to 2025. Chinese companies build open weight models, those models can be used / tuned by hackers, companies that built and released those models don't need to get involved at all.

That is a very different dev model compared to the closed Anthropic way.

> Claude is better than Deepseek

No one is claiming DeepSeek to be better, in fact all benchmark results show that Chinese KIMI, MiniMax and GLM to be on par or very close to the closed weight Claude Code.

Re: Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign

#136

Post by b00ty4breakfast »

atlintots wrote: post #55

I might be crazy, but this just feels like a marketing tactic from Anthropic to try and show that their AI can be used in the cybersecurity domain. My question is, how on earth does does Claude Code even "infiltrate" databases or code from one account, based on prompts from a different account? What's more, it's doing this to what are likely enterprise customers ("large tech companies, financial institutions, ... and…

that's borderline tautological; everything a company like Anthropic does, in the public eye, is pr or marketing. they wouldn't be posting this if it wasn't carefully manicured to deliver the message that they want it to. That's not even necessarily a charge of being devious or underhanded.

Re: Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign

#138

Post by est »

tw1984 wrote: post #133

Chinese have their own coding agents on par with Claude Code, why would they use Claude Code? Also if such agents are useful, they could just FT/RL their own for such specific use case (cyber espionage campaign) and get far better performance. This is basically an IQ test. It gives me the feeling that anthropic is literally implying that Chinese state backed hackers don't have access to be the best Chinese AI and had…

why would they use a single AI provider? There are tons of openrouter-like platforms operated by Chinese. They just choose whatever works.

Re: Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign

#140

Post by phantom-guy »

atlintots wrote: post #55

I might be crazy, but this just feels like a marketing tactic from Anthropic to try and show that their AI can be used in the cybersecurity domain. My question is, how on earth does does Claude Code even "infiltrate" databases or code from one account, based on prompts from a different account? What's more, it's doing this to what are likely enterprise customers ("large tech companies, financial institutions, ... and…

You are not crazy. This was exactly my thought as well. I could tell when it put emphasis on being able to steal credentials in a fraction of the time a hacker would
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