What are the AI threats flagged by Anthropic? | Explained

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While the capabilities of AI systems to target cyber operations, spread misinformation, and enable surveillance have been discussed since their inception, the scope of biological misuse is a relatively new development. Image for representation | Photo Credit: Reuters

Amid heightened debates about threats from and responsible use of artificial intelligence, Anthropic, the research-based U.S. company behind the Claude family of large language models and other AI products, has released several cases of misuse of its systems, warning of growing risks as AI models become more capable.

In a 154-page report published on Thursday (September 10, 2026), the firm released information about several malicious activities detected and disrupted between December 2025 and August 2026, which had serious implications across seven key areas: scams and fraud, cyber operations, illicit distillation, influence operations, surveillance operations, conventional weapons and biological misuse. The actors behind the detected misuse included suspected state-sponsored groups, financially motivated criminals, state propaganda institutions and politically motivated individuals.

While the capabilities of AI systems to target cyber operations, spread misinformation, and enable surveillance have been discussed since their inception, the scope of biological misuse is a relatively new development. In the report titled “Detecting and countering misuse of AI”, Anthropic referred to biological misuse as “one of the most serious risks” of frontier AI, which could have “catastrophic consequences” without the correct safeguards.

The report, coincidentally, comes a day after Jacob Coxon , an AI researcher at Anthropic, quit his post, saying that AI companies were “gambling with our lives” and that the people building AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade”.

Anthropic, in the report, furnished examples of the most notable and novel malicious activities, ranging from fake dating apps designed to defraud users to sophisticated surveillance systems designed to monitor dissidents, identified and disrupted by its “Threat Intelligence” team.

A majority of the operations mentioned in the report, Anthropic said, were directly executed or orchestrated by AI. The use of AI involved multi-agent frameworks for reconnaissance, data filtration, and exploitation instead of simple questions and responses from chatbots. Humans were involved in setting up targets and reviewing exfiltration, it said.

The advance of AI models has done away with the gap separating well-resourced state-sponsored actors and individual operators, Anthropic said in the report. It noted that just a year ago, the majority of the disrupted cases would have required several skilled operators with specialised knowledge.

The first case mentioned in the report is of “Russian espionage” in which operators, a Russian speaker among them, automated activities using AI to evade detection and bypass cyber defences.