China, Iran among countries using AI to spy on dissidents and minorities, Anthropic says

Anthropic said Thursday it shut down multiple cases of state-sponsored surveillance operations that used its artificial intelligence (AI) models, and warned that governments and state-aligned actors are increasingly using AI to spy on ethnic minorities and dissidents.

The incidents were found and disrupted between January and July, and they originated in China, Iran and west Africa, Anthropic said in a report about misuse of its models. 

These surveillance campaigns "targeted the same diaspora and dissident communities these regimes have historically targeted. These include pro-democracy figures in Hong Kong, Tibetan and Falun Gong communities across Asia, and Iranian minority communities and opponents of the Iranian regime abroad," the report said. 

In one case, Iranian actors developed a way to identify people through their social media accounts; in another, a contractor working for Malian national security authorities used Claude "to design the underlying software that enabled the intelligence gathering."

"AI is now being used in place of an engineering workforce," the report said. 

Anthropic also disrupted efforts by users to design weapons, conduct questionable biological research, and create dating scams. 

The San Francisco-based AI lab also accused Chinese developers of deceptively using Claude to produce responses to user queries while simultaneously "distilling" that data to improve their own models. 

Distilling is an industry term that refers to a process where one AI model is used to train another one. 

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Chinese developers have previously been accused of using that technique without permission, essentially stealing resources from American labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI.

Now Anthropic alleges that China's Moonshot and Deepseek have also secretly used Claude to generate answers given to its users. 

"In one instance, over a ten-day period, Moonshot relayed almost 300,000 customer requests to Anthropic" through a "network of 5,380 fraudulent accounts, most of which appeared to be located in Singapore and Japan," the report said. 

Some of that data contained sensitive user information, potentially in violation of privacy agreements. 

"We do not know if Moonshot notified their customers that their requests were being rerouted to Anthropic and exposed to a third party," the report said. 

Deepseek used similar techniques.

When it comes to the research Anthropic detected and blocked that was related to biological weapons, the intent of the actors was less clear-cut and the AI lab did not identify them. 

"The individuals implicated in these case studies are working scientists. We do not assert that they intended harm, and identifying them or their labs could expose them to harm," the report said. 

The scientific research in those cases involved work around the mosquito-born chikungunya virus, a "highly-pathogenic" strain of the bird flu, a family of viruses that include smallpox and mpox, venoms and other toxins.