Russian team ‘misused’ Claude AI to train a killer drone on scraped Ukrainian war footage

A new threat intelligence report from the AI company Anthropic has revealed that a Russian team scraped Ukrainian combat videos to train an autonomous “kamikaze” drone to choose its own targets and destroy them.

Anthropic’s report was published on Sept.

10, two days before CEO and co-founder of the company, Dario Amodei, published an essay arguing that humanity must urgently “slow the pace” of AI development .

Read more: Cyber attacks? Bioterrorism? To ‘Pace the Frontier’ of AI effectively, we must improve our anticipatory thinking The report is a 154-page account of the attempted misuse of Claude AI models for “malicious activity” between December 2025 and August 2026.

It covers seven areas: cyber operations, influence operations, surveillance, scams and fraud, biological misuse, conventional weapons development and distillation.

One case, tracked as GTG-27005, describes a small, likely freelance team in Russia that used Claude’s coding tool to help build software for a swarm of autonomous first-person-view (FPV) “kamikaze” drones — the cheap, camera-guided munitions that have become one of the defining weapons of the war.

Read more: Ukraine’s drone strikes are having an impact on Russia — but Russian leaders remain committed to war This should worry anyone who has ever filmed, shared or trusted footage from the war in Ukraine — one of the most visually documented conflicts in history .

It seems that any visual footage — even that created by journalists, soldiers, civilians and researchers to update the outside world and hold nations accountable — can now feed back into a conflict as raw material for weapons development and deployment on the battlefield.

Autonomous drone, can target a person Anthropic’s report states the company’s threat intelligence teams have “investigated and disrupted multiple threat actors” who used Claude models to develop software for either weapons design and development or for intelligence-gathering and procurement for weapons programs.

The report documents six cases: three in China, two in Russia and one in Yemen.

The “likely freelance Russia-based” developers in case GTG-27005 called their project “DronDoc” or “Serafim.” They began work in May 2026 and routed their traffic through commercial servers to get around Anthropic’s location-based restrictions.

The software they built could enable a drone to pick its own targets, including targets in the category “person,” and issue the command to detonate — without a human confirming the strike first.

That detail made headlines and it deserved the publicity .