A dangerous tipping point? AI hacking claims divide cybersecurity experts

AI startup Anthropic's recent announcement that it detected the world's first artificial intelligence-led hacking campaign has prompted a multitude of responses from cybersecurity experts. In a report on Friday, Anthropic said its assistant Claude Code was manipulated to carry out 80-90 percent of a "large-scale" and "highly sophisticated" cyberattack, with human intervention required "only sporadically". Anthropic, the creator of the popular Claude chatbot, said the attack aimed to infiltrate government agencies, financial institutions, tech firms and chemical manufacturing companies, though the operation was only successful in a small number of cases. The San Francisco-based company, which attributed the attack to Chinese state-sponsored hackers, did not specify how it had uncovered the operation, nor identify the "roughly" 30 entities that it said had been targeted. Roman V Yampolskiy, an AI and cybersecurity expert at the University of Louisville, said there was no doubt that AI-assisted hacking posed a serious threat, though it was difficult to verify the precise details of Anthropic's account.