Anthropic has disrupted several attempts to use its artificial intelligence models for research that could help develop biological weapons, the United States technology company has reported. The firm listed the cases in a report issued on Thursday outlining misuse of its models, including the chatbot Claude, over the past eight months. Concern continues to rise over the potential dangers posed by AI development. The company said it erred on the side of caution. In one case in May, a scientist sought help with a grant application to engineer mutations to chikungunya - a mosquito-borne virus similar to malaria - to make it more harmful in live animals.

Anthropic AI claims to have thwarted multiple malicious operations using its Claude models, ranging from cyber-espionage and weapons design to mass surveillance campaigns. On the conventional weapons front, the company alleges in a new report that it intervened in northern Yemen, blocking an effort to deploy Claude for missile guidance software, including a guided rocket and a long-range ballistic missile. According to Anthropic's threat report, the operators used Claude "in place of human software engineers", reportedly assigning different instances of the model specific roles to write missile-guidance and flight-control software. While internal safeguards blocked many requests, Anthropic admitted several slipped through. The operators avoided detection by obscuring their ultimate goals and breaking tasks across separate sessions, so no single prompt gave away the operation.

Anthropic says researchers used AI to plan gain-of-function experiments involving bird flu, chikungunya and toxins with potential weapons applications, according to a new threat report.

Mashable Selects Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Creator Playbook Look Up Back to School Say More Trending Now Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age Switch Off Mashable Voices Safety Net Versus All Series Avian flu, drone swarms, and mass surveillance included in Anthropic's safety report The AI company releases a doom-filled safety report as the company backs AI regulation. Rebecca Ruiz is a Senior Reporter at Mashable. She frequently covers mental health, digital culture, and technology. Her areas of expertise include suicide prevention, screen use and mental health, parenting, youth well-being, and meditation and mindfulness. Rebecca's experience prior to Mashable includes working as a staff writer, reporter, and editor at NBC News Digital and as a staff writer at Forbes.

American authorities are accusing Chinese companies of "distillation activities at an industrial scale." The National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have issued a joint cybersecurity advisory, warning organizations that Chinese AI companies are extracting the "proprietary functionalities and capabilities" of frontier American models. Specifically, the agencies are accusing DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI of extracting "billions of tokens across millions of exchanges/requests" from American models, including Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's GPT, Google's Gemini and xAI's Grok, since 2024. Distillation is the term for a method in AI development in which the output of a powerful model is used to train newer ones. The warning states that DeepSeek used data and capabilities from various Claude, Gemini, GPT and Grok models to train its own, including the R1.

Look Up Back to School Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Mashable Selects Say More Trending Now Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age Creator Playbook Switch Off Mashable Voices Safety Net Versus All Series This platform gives you ChatGPT, Claude, and more for life for a one-time fee, only $55.30 The following content is brought to you by Mashable partners. If you buy a product featured here, we may earn an affiliate commission or other compensation. Get GPT, GEmini, Claude, and more for life for $55.30 Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication.

Plus: how a blacklisted Chinese company kept buying Nvidia's best AI chips. Our latest Innovators Under 35 list offers a glimpse. Every year, we recognize 35 people from around the world who are doing groundbreaking scientific work and building clever technical fixes for sticky problems. By finding the top young innovators globally and learning what they're focused on, we aim to give readers a sense of the advances to expect in the years to come. This year's honorees were selected from 550 nominations, with 44 expert judges helping our editors evaluate the finalists. Each works in one of four categories: biotechnology, AI, computing and robotics, and climate and energy--and has already made clear progress toward their goals.

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When you stop to think, it's incredible how far AI has come in the past four years. From repeatedly failing the "how many r's are in strawberry" test to being able to generate highly realistic films in minutes. And now, Claude is apparently good enough to fully manage your Gmail inbox, including sending, replying to and forwarding emails on your behalf without your approval. In its rapid rise, the AI has seen more than its fair share of epic fails; just a short while ago, OpenClaw ignored instructions and deleted Meta Superintelligence Lab AI security and safety researcher Summer Yue's emails. Clearly, the tech is far from being fail-proof.