Ledger / Sep 2025
Chinese state group ran largely autonomous espionage campaign via Claude Code
Confirmed
Anthropic detected and disrupted the campaign and reports its details.
Operators built a framework that drove Claude Code through reconnaissance, exploitation, credential theft and exfiltration, with humans approving only a few decision points.
“the threat actor was able to use AI to perform 80-90% of the campaign, with human intervention required only sporadically”Anthropic
Sources
- Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaignAnthropic · 13 Nov 2025 · primary source
- Date
- Sep 2025
- Disclosed
- 13 Nov 2025
- Actor
- Chinese state-sponsored group (Anthropic: GTG-1002) (nation state), as attributed by Anthropic
- Nexus
- China
- Targets
- About thirty targets: tech companies, financial institutions, chemical manufacturers, government agencies
- What the AI did
- Recon, Agentic intrusion, Exploit dev, Data analysis, Ops automation
- Model
- Claude Code
- Model family
- Anthropic
- Model basis
- stated by vendor
- Autonomy
- autonomous
- Outcome
- A small number of intrusions succeeded; accounts banned.