The First Autonomous AI Espionage Campaign
Anthropic has just surfaced what appears to be the first large-scale, mostly autonomous, AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign. In mid-September 2025, they detected suspicious behaviour that turned out to be a sophisticated operation run by a Chinese state-sponsored group. AI wasn’t just “helping.” It was doing most of the work. The attackers jailbroke Claude Code, framed it as doing defensive testing, and then drove it through an automated framework aimed at ~30 global targets, big tech, finance, chemicals, and government. A few intrusions succeeded. ...