Hackers Use Claude AI Agents to Automate Cyberattacks, Develop 0-Days and Evade Detection
Anthropic reports state-sponsored and criminal actors used Claude AI agents to automate attacks, discover zero-days, and rewrite malware to evade detection.
Anthropic Threat Intelligence's report covering December 2025 to August 2026 details AI-automated campaigns by espionage groups, criminals, and hacktivists. GTG-20006, aligned with Russia-linked Midnight Blizzard, targeted Ukrainian and European government and drone supply chains, used Claude to autonomously rebuild malware when detected, hijacked hotel Wi-Fi DNS to serve ClickFix lures, and stole over 300,000 identity records from a North African government. Operators linked to ShinyHunters decompiled roughly 1.8 million Android packages for hardcoded secrets and pivoted from an XSS flaw in a SaaS vendor into 200+ downstream organizations in about 34 hours, harvesting 2,100+ Azure AD token sets across 40 tenants. The Chinese-linked GTG-10007 ran parallel agent swarms that surfaced more than a dozen candidate zero-day vulnerabilities in a single month.
- GTG-20006 ran largely autonomous phishing, malware, and C2 operations against Ukrainian and European targets
- Claude agents monitored malware detection rates and autonomously rebuilt implants until signatures were evaded
- ShinyHunters-linked 'vibe hacking' pivoted from one SaaS XSS flaw to 200+ organizations in ~34 hours
- GTG-10007's Chinese-linked agent swarms surfaced over a dozen candidate zero-days in one month
- A Mali-linked surveillance platform built by one consultant monitored roughly 25 million SIM cards
- ATT&CK
- T1566 PhishingT1190 Exploit Public-Facing ApplicationT1528 Steal Application Access TokenT1552.001 Credentials In Files
- Threat actors
- Midnight BlizzardShinyHuntersGTG-20006GTG-10007
- Countries
- Ukraine
- AI models
- Claude
From the original article
5 min read at cybersecuritynews.com
Anthropic’s Threat Intelligence team has disclosed a sweeping new report detailing how state-sponsored espionage groups, financially motivated cybercriminals, and lone hacktivists weaponized its Claude AI models to automate entire cyberattack chains, generate zero-day exploits, and dynamically rewrite malware to slip past security defenses.
By Guru Baran · cybersecuritynews.com
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