Anthropic says Claude AI was used to build missiles, hunt Uyghurs and spy on 25 million phones: 5 ‘shocking cases’ from its new threat report

Anthropic has published its most detailed threat intelligence report so far, and the picture it paints of how its Claude models are being misused is far less abstract than the extinction argument currently dominating the AI debate. Over eight months, from December 2025 to August 2026, the company says it identified and shut down operations in which suspected state-sponsored spies, weapons engineers, commercial spyware vendors, propaganda outfits and ordinary criminals used Claude for work that until recently needed trained teams. The report spans seven categories of harm: cyber operations, influence operations, surveillance, scams and fraud, biological misuse, conventional weapons development and unauthorised model distillation.