Anthropic has said that it caught China using Claude to help develop an anti-torpedo weapons system intended for the People’s Liberation Army Navy.
The company also said that 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.
“We identified a China-based threat actor who used Claude to advance three parallel tracks of work on an anti-torpedo weapons system,” Anthropic said in an intelligence report it published on Thursday.
According to the report, the actor used Claude to draft a Chinese-language specification for an anti-torpedo fire control system (the core logic that aims and times an anti-torpedo weapon’s response). It added that the document was written to win approval from a Chinese defence manufacturer, which would move the work on to technical certification and operational testing.
Second, the actor used Claude to produce a more than 200-page Chinese-language technical proposal, accompanied by an executive briefing deck. Third, the actor used Claude to benchmark their own system against specific US anti-torpedo and anti-submarine programs based on publicly accessible information, the company said.
The report added that the actor then generated a Chinese-language briefing on US Navy systems, based on open-source reporting. The actor presented itself as an original equipment manufacturer in the US defence sector.
“We assess that the actor was associated with the Chinese defence industry,” Anthropic said in the report.
