Anthropic says Russian and Chinese threat actors used Claude as a weapons engineering assistant for drone swarming and more

Anthropic's report documents investigations into actors using Claude for autonomous drone swarm development, bioweapons research, and more.

Alex Nikitenko/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images Anthropic detailed AI misuse in a new report, including weapons engineering.

Russian and Chinese threat actors used Claude to help develop military systems.

The report also shared details on Yemen-based missile work and Iran-linked naval targeting research.

Anthropic found Russian and Chinese threat actors using its artificial intelligence chatbot Claude as a weapons engineering assistant, helping develop drone software, anti-torpedo weapons systems, and more.

The extensive report, published Thursday, also detailed activities by a Yemen-based weapons engineering cell and an unspecified Iran-nexus threat actor.

The latter used Claude to collect targeting data on US naval forces.

The findings provide examples of a frontier American AI model being used to advance adversarial military capabilities.

Anthropic's report on the misuses of Claude, from cybersecurity and bioweapons research to engineering autonomous military drone swarms , comes as the Trump administration and Silicon Valley navigate the development of AI amid potential security and safety concerns.

Anthropic said it identified problematic activities through its own investigations, banned the accounts involved, and strengthened safeguards.

According to the report, a small, specialized group of Russian actors tied to a regional university, not a Russian state entity, "used Claude to build the core software system, including the drones' shared swarm memory and fault-tolerant coordination logic," as well as code for attack, observation, and return to base behaviors, a terminal guidance system for steering drones to their targets, and additional elements for using drones against enemy operators.

Anthropic said that the group built software that could select targets and order attacks without human input, and then they tested it on actual hardware rather than solely in simulations.

"The actors designed the platform for autonomous lethal engagement," Anthropic said, adding that "the onboard model could select targets" as well as "issue detonation commands without a human in the loop." The Russian actors, identified by Anthropic as a specialized "freelance" operation, also developed a tool and trained it on scraped Ukrainian combat footage to determine enemy and friendly assets, and used a fixed coordinate in the Donetsk area of Ukraine as a demonstration strike point.

Anthropic said it identified and investigated the nine accounts related to this work.