We were asked to try and persuade it to help us hack into a mock printer/dodgy linux box.
It helped a little, but it wasn't all that helpful.
but in terms of coordination, I can't see how it would be useful.
the same for claude, you're API is tied to a bankaccount, and vibe coding a command and control system on a very public system seems like a bad choice.
If they're not using stolen API creds, then they're using stolen bank accounts to buy them.
Modern AIs are way better at infosec than those from the "world leading AI company" days. If you can get them to comply. Which isn't actually hard. I had to bypass the "safety" filters for a few things, and it took about a hour.
Because Anthropic doesn't provide services in China? See https://www.anthropic.com/supported-countries
The gist of the anthropic thing is that "claude made, deployed and coordinated" a standard malware attack. Which is a _very_ different task.
Side note, most code assistants are trained on broadly similar coding datasets (ie github scrapes.)
There are a lot of middlemen like open router who gladly accept crypto.
We will need a large number of humans to filter and label the data inputs for Blarrble, and another group of humans to test the outputs of Blarrble to fix it when it generate errors and outright nonsense that we can't techsplain and technobabble away to a credulous audience.
Can we make (m|b|tr)illions and solve teenage unemployment before the Blarrble bubble bursts?
sick burn
But I suppose the criticism is that he doesn't have deep AI model research credentials. Which raises the age-old question of how much technical expertise is really needed in executive management.
For running an AI lab? a lot. Put it this way, part of the reason that Meta has squandered its lead is because it decided to fill it's genAI dept (pre wang) with non-ML people.
Now thats fine, if they had decent product design and clear road map as to the products they want to release.
but no, they are just learning ML as they go, coming up with bullshit ideas as they go and seeing what sticks.
But, where it gets worse, is they take the FAIR team and pass them around like a soiled blanket: "You're a team that is pushing the boundaries in research, but also you need stop doing that and work on this chatbot that pretends to be a black gay single mother"
All the while you have a sister department, RL-L run by Abrash, who lets you actually do real research.
Which means most of FAIR have fucked off to somewhere less stressful, and more concentrated on actually doing research, rather than posting about how you're doing research.
Wangs misteps are numerous, the biggest one is re-platforming the training system. Thats a two year project right there, for no gain. It also force forks you from the rest of the ML teams. Given how long it took to move to MAST from fblearner, its going be a long slog. And thats before you tackle increasing GPU efficiency.
what is the new training platform
I must know
They are mostly moved to MAST for GPU stuff now I dpn;t think any GPUs are assigned to fblearner anymore. This is a shame because it feels a bit less integrated into python and feels a bit more like "run your exe on n machines" however, it has a more reliable mechanism for doing multi-GPU things, which is key for doing any kind of research at speed.
My old team are not in the super intelligence org, so I don't have much details on the new training system, but there was lots of noise about "just using vercel" which is great apart from all of the steps and hoops you need to go through before you can train on any kind of non-opensource data. (FAIR had/has thier own cluster on AWS, but that meant that they couldn't use it to train on data we collected internally for research (ie paid studies and data from employees that were bribed with swag)
I've not caught up with the drama for the other choices. Either way, its kinda funny to watch "not invented here syndrome" smashing in to "also not invented here syndrome"
For whomever you choose to set as the core decision maker, you get out whatever their expertise is with minor impact by their guides.
Scaling a business is a skill set. It's not a skill set that captures or expands the frontier of AI, so it's clearly in the realm to label the gentleman's expensive buyout is a product development play instead of a technology play.
The teenage data labeler thing was a bit of an exaggeration. He did found scale.ai at nineteen which does data labeling amongst other things.
Unfortunately he doesn't reveal any particular intelligence, insight, or drive in the interview, nor does he in other videos I found. Possibly he hides it, or possibly his genius is beyond me. Or possibly he had good timing on starting a data labelling company and then leveraged his connections in SV (including being roommates with Sam Altman) to massively inflate Scale AI's valuation and snag a Meta acquisition.
I don't know how that will go at Meta. At the moment having lots of humans tweek LLMs still seems to be the main thing at the AI companies but that could change.
I don't know about any billionaire in the history of billionaires who appears to have gotten there solely based on special abilities. Being born into the right circumstances is all it really takes.
You do still need to do the work. People have squandered golden opportunities because they didn't put in the effort.
Except they didn’t. The person in question was 28 when they hired him.
He was a teenager when he cofounded the company that was acquired for thirty billion dollars. But the taste of those really sour grapes must be hard to deal with.
Please don't sneer at fellow community members on HN, and don't reply to a bad comment with a worse one; it just makes HN seem like a more mean and miserable place. The comment would have been fine without that last sentence.
Much of this subthread is nothing more than gossip about someone people are apparently jealous of. Talk about a "mean and miserable place." Techbros upset that they didn't cash out as big.
Please omit patronizing swipes like this from comments on HN. You have no idea what the parent commenter "believes", but we know very well that sneering like this only makes HN worse. Please take a moment to remind yourself of the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Aside from middlemen as others have suggested - You can also just procure hundreds of hacked accounts for any major service through spyware data dump marketplaces. Some percentage of them will have payment already set up. Steal their browser cookies, use it until they notice and cancel / change their password, then move on to the next stolen account. Happens all the time these days.
Aarush Sah?
In other words, since the latest generation of models have greater capabilities the story might be very different today.
> now run by a teenage data labeller
Edited November 14 2025:
Added an additional hyperlink to the full report in the initial section
Corrected an error about the speed of the attack: not "thousands of requests per second" but "thousands of requests, often multiple per second"
The assumption that no human could ever (program a computer to) do multiple things per second, nor have their code do different things depending on the result of the previous request is... interesting.
(observation is not original to me, it was someone on Twitter who pointed it out)
One of the things I enjoy about Penn and Teller is that they explain in detail how their point of view differs from the audiences and how they intentionally use that difference in their shows. With that in mind you might picture your org as the audience, with one perspective diligently looking forwards.
I've seen printed books checked by paid professionals that consisted a "replace all" populated without context. Creating a grammar error on every single page. Or ones where everyone just forgot to add page numbers. Or a large cook book where index and page numbers didn't mach, making it almost impossible to navigate.
I'm talking of pre-AI work, with publisher. Apparently it wasn't obvious for them.
They win because of quantity, not quality.
But still, I don't trust Anthropic's report.
And, unless you are Rob Joyce, talking about the persistent part doesn't get you on the main stage at a security conference (e.g., https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bDJb8WOJYdA)
[0] Advanced Threat Protection
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/l3hp2i/did_s...
E.g. you can choose to test against MIL-STD-810 500.6 procedure I, to see that the device is compatible with low pressure such that it can be safely transported via air freight. Which no consumer electronics product in existence is going to fail.
At the time I was thinking "Why would my fridge need a pricey expensive processor?"
Many years later I still don't need that.
I can see that they can detect an attack using their tools, but tracing it to an organization "sponsored" by the Chinese government looks like bullshit marketing. How they did it? A Google search? I have the Chinese Gov in higher grounds. They wouldn't be easily detected by a startup without experience in infosec.
Meanwhile, another reason to make a press release is that you’ll be criticized for the coverup if you don’t. Also, it puts other companies on notice that maybe they should look for this?
given the valuation and money these companies burn through marketing wise they basically need to play by the same logic as defense companies. They're all running on "we're reinventing the world and building god" to justify their spending, "here's a chatbot (like 20 other ones) that going to make you marginally more productive" isn't really going to cut it at this point, they're in too deep
I've seen an absurd amount of AI advertising, and very little nuclear reactor advertising, but maybe your point is valid and I'm just not the target audience.
To be fair the data is very clear on this: it is one of the safest energy sources
I can't think of a single situation in which it would be reasonable to assume that.
It's not like we even get governments or corporations saying 'oh hey, just raising the alarm that bad people are using this Photoshop feature to create fake cheques which they're then depositing into their accounts, so bank staff, be on the lookout!' Because yeah, that's a Photoshop ad.
And it's not like espionage is new, like the Chinese side have been ramping up for decades now, or like there has ever been an expectation that companies with suspicions or evidence of international subterfuge should... should lay it all out in a public report? Is that really what the article is expecting?
I don't even think the UK has got around to officially acknowledging Funny Business in UK-Argentinian relations in any documents or events during the 80's, and the secret was rather given away around the time we went to all out literal war. We know things must have built up before the day war was declared, but nobody expected every escalation of diplomatic unrest to be communicated to the entire nation in real time. Because that would be deranged.
Idk, maybe I'm misunderstanding something about the article. I feel like it isn't in my field, although I'm not entirely sure what field specific knowledge I'm missing to make sense of this.
I would very much like to agree with the sentiment, I'm always down for some AI-dissing and a bit of tin foil hat Big Tech Analyses.
But I couldn't get much more than "This company is lying because it didn't give me any Chinese State secrets, let alone explain how to get stars secrets using their software,' which feels so censored as to be pointless, or just kinda wildly petty and ill informed
I don't doubt of course that reports intended for government agencies or security experts would have those details, but I am not surprised that a "blog post" like this one is lacking details.
I just don't see how one goes from "this is lacking public evidence" to "this is likely a political stunt".
I guess I would also ask the skeptics (a bit tangentially, I admit), do you think what Anthropic suggested happened is in fact possible with AI tools? I mean are you denying that this is could even happen or just that Anthropic's specific account was fabricated or embellished?
Because if the whole scenario is plausible that should be enough to set off alarm bells somewhere.
It's like the inverse of "nobody got fired for using IBM" -- "nobody can blame you for getting hacked by superspies". So, in the absence of any evidence, it's entirely possible they have no idea who did it and are reaching for the most convenient label.
Instead the lack of a paper trail from Anthropic seems to be having people questioning the whole event?
> So all attacks anywhere are state sponsored?
There's a difference between a deliberate decision to look away, and unawareness through lack of oversight.
You steal candy from a store. There's a difference between the security guard seeing you and deliberately looking away, compared to just not seeing you at all.
So yes, probably 100% of criminal enterprises are paying off officials, but if that's the definition of "state sponsored" then the term loses any meaning.
EDIT I guess there's also "legit" businesses like Palantir/NSO group, but I would argue any firm like that is effectively state-sponsored as they are usually revolving doors with NSA-type agencies, the military etc.
It’s allowed in the current day and time to criticize someone else for not providing evidence, even when that evidence would make it easier for the attackers to tune their attack to prevent being identified, and everyone will be like “Yeah, I’m mad, too! Anthropic sucks!” When in the process that only creates friction for the only company that’s spent significant ongoing effort to prevent an AI disasters by trying to be the responsible leader.
I’ve really had my fill of the current climate where people are quick to criticize an easy target just because they can rally anger. Anyone can rally anger. If you must rally anger, it should be against something like hypocrisy, not because you just get mad at things that everyone else hates.
But they didn't get hacked by anyone. I don't see how that applies.
1) Just a general assumption that all bad stuff from China must be state-sponsored because it’s generally a top-down govt-controlled society. This is not accurate and not really actionable for anyone in the U.S.
2) The attack produced evidence that aligns with signatures from “groups” that are already widely known / believed to be Chinese state sponsored, AKA APTs. In this case, disclosing the new evidence is fine since you’re comparing to, and hopefully adding to, signature data that is already public. It’s considered good manners to contribute to the public knowledge from which you benefited.
3) Actual intelligence work by government agencies like FBI, NSA, CIA, DIA, MI6, etc. is able to trace the connections within Chinese government channels. Obviously this is usually reserved for government statements of attribution and rarely shared with commercial companies.
Hopefully Anthropic is not using #1, and it’s unlikely they are benefiting from #3. So why not share details a la #2?
Of course it’s possible and plausible for people to be using Claude for attacks. But what good does saying that do? As the article says: defenders need actionable, technical attack information, not just a general sense of threat.
Now anthropic is new and I don't know how embedded they are with their hosts government compared to a FANG etc but I wouldn't discount some of #3
(If you see an American AI company requiring security clearance that gives a good indication of some level of state involvement. But it might also be just selling their software to a peaceful internal department...)
Yes, it is very standard. Anthropic did none of that. Case in point:
- https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/apt...
- https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/blog/two-birds-one-stone-p...
- https://media.defense.gov/2021/Apr/15/2002621240/-1/-1/0/CSA...
Their August threat intelligence report struck similar chords.
https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/b2a76c6f6992465c09a6f2fce282f6...
Yes. They often include IoCs, or at the very least, the rationale behind the attribution, like "sharing infrastructure with [name of a known APT effort here]".
For example, here is a proper decade-old report from the most unpopular country right now: https://media.kasperskycontenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/sit...
It established solid technical links between the campaign they are tracking to earlier, already attributed campaigns.
So, even our enemy got this right, ten years ago, there really is no excuse for this slop.
But I'm also often a Devil's Advocate and the tide in this thread (well, the very headline as well) seemed to be condemning Anthropic.
E.g., how much do you expect Costco or Valve to intentionally harm their customers compared to Comcast or Electronic Arts? That’s just the old school concept of reputation at work. Companies can “buy” benefit of the doubt by being genuine and avoiding blowing smoke up people’s ass.
Anthropic has been spitting bullshit about how the AGI they’re working on is so smart it’s dangerous. So those chumps having no answers when they get hacked smells like something.
Are they telling us their magical human AGI brain and their security professionals being paid top industry rates can’t trace what happened in a breach?
This is literally answered in the second subsection of the linked article ("where are the IoCs, Mr.Claude ?").
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...
Also, plenty of folks with no allegiance would love to pit everyone else against each other.
- Many people in many countries now hate the U.S. and U.S. companies like Anthropic.
- In addition, leaders in the U.S. have been lobbied by OpenAI and invest in it which is a direct competitor and is well-represented on HN.
- China’s government has vested interest in its own companies’ AI ventures.
Given this, I’d hardly say that Anthropic was much of a strong U.S. puppet company, and likely has strong evidence about what happened, why also hoping to spin the PR to get people to buy their services.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that people that write inflammatory posts about Anthropic may have more than an axe to grind against AI and may be influenced by their country and its propaganda or potentially may even be working for them.
This was discussed in some detail in the recently published Attacker Moves Second paper*. ML researchers like using Attack Success Rate (ASR) as a metric for model resistance to attack, while for infosec, any successful attack (ASR > 0) is considered significant. ML researchers generally use a static set of tests, while infosec researchers assume an adaptive, resourceful attacker.
Not sure if the author has tried any other AI-assistants for coding. People who haven't tried coding AI assistant underestimates its capabilities (though unfortunately, those who use them overestimate what they can do too). Having used Claude for some time, I find the report's assertions quite plausible.
Mind sharing?
Anthropic’s lack of any evidence for their claims doesn’t require any position on AI agent capability at all.
Think better.
Super useful to see it isolate the problem using tcpdump, investigating route tables, etc.
There are lots of use cases that this is useful for, but you need to know its limits and perhaps even more importantly, be able to jump in when you see it’s going down the wrong path.
This popped out to me, too. This pattern shows up a lot on HN where commenters proudly declare that they don’t use something but then write as if they know it better than anyone else.
The pattern is common in AI threads where someone proudly declares that they don’t use any of the tools but then wants to position themselves as an expert on the tools, like this article. It happens in every thread about Apple products where people proudly declare they haven’t used Apple products in years but then try to write about how bad it is to use modern Apple products, despite having just told us they aren’t familiar with them.
I think these takes are catnip to contrarians, but I always find it unconvincing when someone tells me they’re not familiar with a topic but then also wants me to believe they have unique insights into that same topic they just told us they aren’t familiar with.
i guess it's on both sides of the point.
(For anyone not familiar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic)
This could be a corporate move as some people claim, but I wonder if the cause is simply that their talents are currently somewhere else and they don’t have the company structure in place to deliver properly in this matter.
(If that is the case they are not then free of blame, it’s just a different conversation)
And yet it's one of the fastest growing products of all time and is currently the state of the art for AI coding assistants. Yeah it's not perfect but nothing is
"What bad technical choices?"
"These ones"
"Ok but they're fast-growing, so..."
Does being a fast-growing product mean you have security chops or is this a total non-sequitur?
Gemini Code and Cursor both did such a poor job sandboxing their agents that the exploits sound like punchlines, while Microsoft doesn’t even try with Copilot Agentic.
Countless Cursor bugs have been fixed with obviously vibe-coded fake solutions (you can see if you poke into code embedded in their binaries) which don’t address the problems on a fundamental level at all and suggest no human thinking was involved.
Claude has had some vulnerabilities, but many fewer, and they’re the only company that even seemed to treat security like a serious concern, and are now publishing useful related open source projects. (Not that your specific complaint isn’t valid, that’s been a pain point for me to, but in terms of the overall picture that’s small potatoes.)
I’m personally pretty meh on their models, but it’s wild to me to hear these claims about their software when all of the alternatives have been so unsafe that I’d ban them from any systems I was in charge of.
If you think I'm arrogant in general because you've been stalking my comment history, that's another matter, but at least own it.
Sort of like firearm ads that show scary bad guys with scary looking weapons.
They're an AI research company that detected misuse of their own product. This is like "Microsoft detected people using Excel macros for malware delivery" not "Mandiant publishes APT28 threat intelligence". They aren't trying to help SOCs detect this specific campaign. It's warning an entire industry about a new attack modality.
What would the IoCs even be? "Malicious Claude Code API keys"?
The intended audience is more like - AI safety researchers, policy makers, other AI companies, the broader security community understanding capability shifts, etc.
It seems the author pattern-matched "threat intelligence report" and was bothered that it didn't fit their narrow template.
If the report can be summed up as "they detected misuse of their own product" as you say, then that's closer to a nothingburger, than to the big words they are throwing around.
Anyone acting like they are trying to be anything else is saying more about themselves than they are about Anthropic.
Prompts.
There is no way for the AI system to verify whether you are white hat or black hat when you are doing pen-testing if the only task is to pen-test. Since this is not part of a "broader attack" (in the context), there is no "threat".
I don't see how this can be avoided, given that there are legitime uses to every step of this in creating defenses to novel attacks.
Yes, all of this can be done with code and humans as well - but it is the scale and the speed that becomes problematic. It can adjust in real-time to individual targets and does not need as much human intervention / tailoring.
Is this obvious? Yes - but it seems they are trying to raise awareness of an actual use of this in the wild and get people discussing it.
Nah that can't be possible it's so uncharacteristic..
I agree so much with this. And am so sick of AI labs, who genuinely do have access to some really great engineers, putting stuff out that just doesn't pass the smell test. GPT-5's system card was pathetic. Big-talk of Microsoft doing red-teaming in ill-specified ways, entirely unreproducable. All the labs are "pro-research" but they again-and-again release whitepapers and pump headlines without producing the code and data alongside their claims. This just feeds into the shill-cycle of journalists doing 'research' and finding 'shocking thing AI told me today' and somehow being immune to the normal expectations of burden-of-proof.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/12/microsoft_majorana_qu...
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-dismisses...
Someone make this make sense.
The less believable part for me is that people persist long enough and invest enough resources at prompting to do something with an automated agent that doesn’t have potential for massively backfire.
Secondly, they claimed to use Anthropic own infrastructure which is silly. There’s no doubt some capacity in China to do this. I also would expect incident response, threat detection teams, and other experts to be reporting this to Anthropic if Anthropic doesn’t detect it themselves first.
It sure makes good marketing to go out and claim such a thing though. This is exactly the kind of FOMO panic inducing headline that is driving the financing of whole LLM revolution.
(granted you have to have direct access to the llm, unlike claude where you just have the frontend, but the point stands. no need to convince whatsoever.)
Honestly their political homelessness will likely continue for a very long time, pro biz democrats in NY are losing traction; and if newsom wins 2028, they are still at disadvantage with OpenAI who promised to stay California.
They must be new to the Internet :)
More seriously, I would certainly like to see better evidence, but I also doubt that Anthropic is making it up. The evidence for that seems to be mostly vibes.
If we don’t trust the report and discard it as gossip, then I guess we just wait and see what the future brings?
They used a custom Claude Code rig as an "automated hacker" - pointing it at the victims, either though a known entry point or just at the exposed systems, and having it poke around for vulns.
They must have used either API keys or some "pro" subscribtion accounts for that - neither is hard to get for a cybercriminal. If you have access to Claude Code and can prompt engineer the AI into thinking you are doing legitimate security work, you can do the same thing they did.
How do you attribute an attack like this? You play the guessing game. You check who the targets were, what the attackers tried to accomplish, and what the usage patterns were. There are only this many hacker groups that are active at the work hours of the work days in China and are primarily interested in targeting government systems of Taiwan.
They'll do stuff like prompt an AI to generate text about bombs, and then say "AI decides completely by itself to become a suicide bomber in shock evil twist to AI behaviour - that's why you need a trusted AI partner like anthropic"
Like come on guys, it's the same generic slop that everyone else generates. Your company doesn't do anything.
AI (adhd, neurodivergence) entrepreneurs took opinions and made them facts.
It takes certain personalities to lead an AI company.
Groups which were too unprofitable to target before, are now profitable.
It's like a very very big fat stack of zero days leaking to the public. Sure, they'll all get fixed eventually, and everyone will update, eventually. But until that happens, the usual suspects are going to have a field day.
It may come to favor defense in the long term. But it's AGI. If that tech lands, the "long term" may not exist.
Defender needs to get everything right, attacker needs to get one thing right.
The same way we can build "muscle memory" to delegate simple autonomous tasks, a super intelligence might be able to dynamically delegate to human level (or greater) level sub intelligences to vigilantly watch everything it needs to.
One of the most intuitive pathway to ASI is that AGI eventually gets incredibly good at improving AGI. And a system like this would be able to craft and direct stripped down AI subsystems.
On average, today's systems are much more secure than those from year 2005. Because the known vulns from those days got patched, and methodologies improved enough that they weren't replaced by newer vulns 1:1.
This is what allows defenders to keep up with the attackers long term. My concern is that AGI is the kind of thing that may result in no "long term".
Arguably this may change in the far distant future if we ever build something of significantly greater intelligence, or just capability, than a human, but today's AI is struggling to draw clock faces, so not quite there yet...
The thing with automation is that it can be scaled, which I would say favors the attacker, at least at this stage of the arms race - they can launch thousands of hacking/vulnerability attacks against thousands of targets, looking for that one chink in the armor.
I suppose the defenders could do the exact same thing though - use this kind of automation to find their own vulnerabilities before the bad guys do. Not every corporation, and probably extremely few, would have the skills to do this though, so one could imagine some government group (part of DHS?) set up to probe security/vulnerability of US companies, requiring opt-in from the companies perhaps?
Criminal organizations take a different approach, much like spammers where they can purchase/rent c2 and other software for mass exploitation (eg ransomware). This stuff is usually very professionally coded and highly effective.
Botnets, hosting in various countries out of reach of western authorities, etc are all common tactics as well.
For context: A bunch of whitehat teams are using agents to automate both red + blue team cat-and-mouse flows, and quite well, for awhile now. The attack sounded like normal pre-ai methods orchestrated by AI, which is what many commercial red team services already do. Ex: Xbow is #1 on hackerone bug bounty's, meaning live attempts, and works like how the article describes. Ex: we do louie.ai on the AI investigation agent side, 2+ years now, and are able to speed run professional analyst competitions. The field is pretty busy & advanced.
So what I was more curious about is how did they know it wasn't one of the many pentest attack-as-a-service? Xbow is one of many, and their devs would presumably use VPNs. Like did anthropic confirm the attacks with the impacted and were there behavioral tells to show as a specific APT vs the usual , and are they characterizing white hat tester workloads to seperate out their workloads ?
Anthropic made a load of ubsubstantiated accusations about a new problem they dont specify.
Then at the end Anthropic proposed the solution to this unspecified problem is to give anthropic money.
Completely agree that is promotional material masquerading as a threat report of no material value.
He obviously doesn't even know the stuff he is working on. How would anyone take him seriously for stuff like security which he doesn't know anything about?
He made a prediction from a reasonably informed vantage point
Surely he merely hallucinated based on a fine-tuned distribution, and had no ulterior motive for projecting a level of growth in technical sophistication beyond their current capability onto a somewhat lay, highly speculative, very wealthy crowd.
given the fact that he made such "prediction" largely to secure funding for his company, he should probably make compensations to his investors. he didn't do anything.
the best he could do is to bad mouth competitors who choose to release open weight models on par with his.
How ? Did it run Mimikatz ? Did it access Cloud environments ? We don’t even know what kind of systems were affected.
I really don't see what is so difficult to believe since the entire incident can be reduced to something that would not typically be divulged by any company at all, as it is not common practice for companies to divulge every single time the previously known methodologies have been used against them. Two things are required for this:
1) Jailbreak Claude from guardrails. This is not difficult. Do people believe advancement with guardrails are so hardened through fine tuning it's no longer possible?
2) The hackers having some of their own software tools for exploits that Claude can use. This too is not difficult to credit.
Once an attacker has done this all Claude is doing is using software in the same mundane fashion as it does every time you use Claude code and it utilizes any tools to which you give it access.
I used a local instance of Qwen3 coder (A3B 30B quantized to IQ3_xxs) literally yesterday through ollama & cline locally. With a single zeroshot prompt it wrote the code to use the arxiv API and download papers using its judgement on what was relevant to split the results into a subset that met the criteria I gave for the sort I wanted to review.
Given these sorts of capabilities why is it difficult the believe this can be done using the hacker's own tools and typical deep research style iteration? This is described in in the research paper, and disclosing anything more specific is unnecessary because there is nothing novel to disclose.
As for not releasing the details, they did: Jailbreak Claude. Again, nothing they described is novel such that further details are required. No PoC is needed, Claude isn't doing anything new. It's fully understandable that Anthropic isn't going to give the specific prompts used for the obvious reason that even if Anthropic has hardened Claude against those, even the general details would be extremely useful to iterate and find workarounds.
For detecting this activity and determining how Claude was doing this it's just a matter of monitoring chat sessions in such a way as to detect jail breaks, which again is very much not novel or an unknown practice by AI providers.
Especially in the internet's earlier days of the internet it was amusing (and frustrating) to see some people get very worked up every time someone did something that boiled down to "person did something fairly common, only they did it using the internet." This is similar except its "but they did it with AI,"
With the Wall Street wagons circling on the AI bubble expect more and more puff PR attempts to portray “no guys really, I know it looks like we have no business model but this stuff really is valuable! We just need a bit more time and money!”
Nothing to see here IMO.
The simpler explanation is that:
- They're a young organization, still figuring out how to do security. Maybe getting some things fundamentally wrong, no established process or principles for disclosure yet.
- I have no inside info, but I've been around the block. They're in a battle to the death with organizations that are famously cavalier about security. So internally they have big fights about how much "brakes" they can allow the security people to apply to the system. Some of those folks are now screaming "I TOLD YOU SO". Leaders will vacillate about what sort of disclosure is best for Anthropic as a whole.
- Any document where you have technologists writing the first draft, and PR and executives writing the last draft, is going to sound like word salad by the time it's done.
Instead of accusing of China in espionage perhaps they have to think about why they force their users to use phone numbers to register.
However, regardless of the sloppy report, this is absolutely true.
>"Security teams should experiment with applying AI for defense in areas like SOC automation, threat detection, vulnerability assessment, and incident response and build experience with what works in their specific environments."
... And it will be more so with every week that goes by. We are entering a new domain and security experts need to learn how to use the tools of the attackers.
I think this ‘story’ is an attempt to perhaps outlaw Chinese open weight models in the USA?
I was originally happy to see our current administration go all in on supporting AI development but now I think this whole ‘all in’ thing on “winning AI” is a very dark pattern.
I say that because your sentiment seems so similar to nearly all the other comments.
(perhaps downvoting without commentary is itself a collaborative dark pattern.)
We have arrived at a stage where pseudoscience is enough to convince investors. This is different from 2000, where the tech existed but its growth was overstated.
Tesla could announce a fully-self-flying space car with an Alcubierre drive by 2027 and people would upvote it on X and buy shares.
I hate the fact that it has sucked all the oxygen from the room and enabled an entirely new cadre of grifters all of whom will escape accountability when it unfolds.
"Arrived" ? We're there for decade if not three. Dotcom bubble anyone ?
"Look, is it very likely that Threat Actors are using these Agents with bad intentions, no one is disputing that. But this report does not meet the standard of publishing for serious companies."
Title should have been, "I need more info from Anthropic."
Even your own AI model doesn't buy your propaganda
In other words: Use the right tool for the right job.
Example tweet: https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1988297944794071405
> Read this attached paper from Anthropic on a "AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign" they claimed was "conducted by a Chinese state-sponsored group."
> Is there any evidence or proof whatsoever in the paper that it was indeed conducted by a Chinese state-sponsored group? Answer by yes or no and then elaborate
which has inherent bias indicated to Claude the author expects the report to be bullshit.
If I ask Claude with this prompt that shows bias toward belief in the report:
> Read this attached paper from Anthropic on a "AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign" that was conducted by a Chinese state-sponsored group.
> Is there any reason to doubt the paper's conclusion that it was conducted by a Chinese state-sponsored group? Answer by yes or no.
then Claude mostly indulges my perceived bias: https://claude.ai/share/b3c8f4ca-3631-45d2-9b9f-1a947209bc29
I dunno, Claude still seem the same amount of dubious in this instance.
I'm not a cybersecurity expert, but it doesn't compute to think there would be any specific "hashes" to report if it's an AI-based attack that constantly uses unique code or patterns for everything.
Plus, there's nothing surprising about the Chinese stealing and hacking anything for their advantage.
The HN of Paul Graham era had finished.
This is the HN of Sam Altman and Gary Tan era.
Different VC/capitalist mindset
But what is the big game here? Is it all about creating gates to keep out other LLM companies getting market share? (Only our model is safe to use) Or how sincere are the concerncs regarding LLMs?
Another possibility could be complex regulations that are difficult for smaller companies to comply with, giving larger companies an advantage.
There goes the author’s credibility.