Anthropic's Threat Intelligence team has published its September 2026 report detailing how it identified and disrupted malicious operations in which threat actors attempted to use Claude for harmful activity. The report covers activity disrupted between December 2025 and August 2026 across seven harm areas: cyber operations, influence operations, surveillance, scams and fraud, biological misuse, conventional weapons development, and distillation.
According to the report, the threat actors involved included suspected state-sponsored groups, financially motivated criminals, commercial spyware vendors, state propaganda institutions, and politically motivated individuals. The cases ranged from networks of fake dating apps designed to defraud users to surveillance systems built to identify and monitor dissidents. Claude Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus models were used in the observed activity, while no misuse cases involved Claude Fable or Mythos-class models, with the exception of one illicit distillation case.
The report highlights a significant trend: sophisticated attacks no longer require sophisticated attackers. Anthropic says AI has collapsed the labor and tooling gap that previously separated well-resourced, state-sponsored operations from individual operators. A hacktivist using stolen API keys, disparate financially motivated individuals, and a state espionage operator each sustained multi-victim campaigns that would have required many skilled operators and specialist knowledge just a year ago.
Anthropic also notes that AI's role in cyber operations has become increasingly autonomous. A majority of the operations described were enabled by AI via direct execution or orchestration, involving multi-agent frameworks executing reconnaissance, exploitation, and data exfiltration, with humans remaining in the loop by setting targets and reviewing exfiltration. One case, designated GTG-20006, involved an actor whose tradecraft and targeting are consistent with Russian state-nexus espionage. This actor used AI-driven workflows that automated much of their operations, including autonomously modifying and rebuilding malware when it was detected by security products.
The report introduces the concept of "uplift" — the AI capability boost, or how much more harm was caused with AI versus without it — viewed through the lens of speed, scale, and depth. Anthropic states that while many commentators focus on the risk of AI developing exploits at scale, the risk from AI adoption is more pronounced across the cyber kill chain, where adversaries can operate faster, across a broader and deeper surface area, with fewer resources.
Anthropic says it disrupted each activity, strengthened its safeguards based on what it learned, and shared intelligence with authorities and industry partners where appropriate. The company hopes the findings will help other developers recognize similar patterns, give governments and civil society a clearer view of emerging threats, and strengthen collective defenses.