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Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign

anthropic.com

141–150 of 298 posts

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

#141
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…

You fell for the propaganda

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

#142
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…

Nobody has access to 'frontier quality models' except Open AI, Anthropic, Google, maybe Grok, maybe Meta etc. aka nobody in China quite yet. And - there are 'layers' of Engineering beyond just model that make quite a big difference. For certain tasks, GPT5 might be beyond all others, same for Claude + Claude.

That said, the fact that they're doing this while knowing that Anthropic could be monitoring implies a degree of either real or arbitrary irreverence: either they were lazy or dumb (unlikely), or it was some ad hoc situation wherein they really just did not care. Some sub-sub-sub team at some entity just 'started doing stuff' without a whole lot of thought.

'State Backed Entities' are very numerous, it's not unreasonable that some of them, somewhere are prompting a few things that are sketchy.

I'm sure there's a lot of this going on everywhere - and this is the one Anthropic chose to highlight for whatever reasons, which could be complicated.

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

#143
post #42

It sounds like they directly used Anthropic-hosted compute to do this, and knew that their actions and methods would be exposed to Anthropic? Why not just self-host competitive-enough LLM models, and do their experiments/attacks themselves, without leaking actions and methods so much?

Why 'host' just to tap a few prompts in and see what happens? Worst case, you loose an account. Usually the answer has to do with people being less sophisticated than otherwise.

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

#145
post #68

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…

This isn't a security breach in Anthropic itself, it's people using Claude to orchestrate attacks using standard tools with minimal human involvement. Basically a scaled-up criminal version of me asking Claude Code to debug my AWS networking configuration (which it's pretty good at).

Bragging about how they monitor users and how they have installed more guardrails.

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

#146
Recently I've used Claude Code to perform some entry to mid level web-based CTF hunting in a fully autonomous mode (--allow-dangerously-skip-permissions in an isolated environment). It excels at low hanging fruit - XSS, other injections, IDOR, hidden form fields, session fixation, careful enumeration, etc.

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

#147

I think as AI gets smarter, defenders should start assembling systems how NixOS does it. Defenders should not have to engage in an costly and error-prone search of truth about what's actually deployed. Systems should be composed from building blocks, the security of which can be audited largely independently, verifiably linking all of the source code, patches etc to some form of hardware attestation of the running sy…

We soon will have to implement paradoxes in our infrastructure.

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

#148
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still marketing , "Claude is being used for evil and for good ! How will YOU survive without your own agents ? (Subtext 'It's practically sentient !')"

It's marketing, but if it's the truth, isn't it a public good to release information about this? Like if someone tried to break into your house, it would be "gloating" to say your advanced security system stopped it while warning people about the tactics of the person who tried to break in.

If in the next page over you sell advanced security systems yes it'd be suspicious and weird, which is the case here.

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

#149

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…

Not saying this is definitely not a fabrication but there are multiple parties involved who can verify (the targets) and this coincides with Anthropic ban of Chinese entities

Would be funny if the NSA did this so people block the Chinese.

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

#150
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…

Nobody has access to 'frontier quality models' except Open AI, Anthropic, Google, maybe Grok, maybe Meta etc. aka nobody in China quite yet. And - there are 'layers' of Engineering beyond just model that make quite a big difference. For certain tasks, GPT5 might be beyond all others, same for Claude + Claude. That said, the fact that they're doing this while knowing that Anthropic could be monitoring implies a degree…

> Nobody has access to 'frontier quality models' except Open AI, Anthropic, Google, maybe Grok, maybe Meta etc. aka nobody in China quite yet.

welcome to 2025. Meta doesn't have anything on par with what Chinese got, that is common knowledge. Kimi, GLM, QWen and MiniMax are all frontier models no matter how you judge it. DeepSeek is obviously cooking something big, you need to be totally blind to ignore that.

America's lead in LLM is just weeks, not quarters or years. Arguing that Chinese spy agencies have to rely on American coding agents to do its job is more like a joke.

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