Menu planning, therapy, essay writing, highly sophisticated global cyberattacks: People just keep coming up with innovative new uses for the latest AI chatbots.

An alarming new milestone was reached this week when the artificial intelligence company Anthropic announced that its flagship AI assistant Claude was used by Chinese hackers in what the company is calling the “first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign.”

According to a report released by Anthropic, in mid-September, the company detected a large-scale cyberespionage operation by a group they’re calling GTG-1002, directed at “major technology corporations, financial institutions, chemical manufacturing companies, and government agencies across multiple countries.”

Attacks like that are not unusual. What makes this one stand out is that 80 to 90 percent of it was carried out by AI. After human operators identified the target organizations, they used Claude to identify valuable databases within them, test for vulnerabilities, and write its own code to access the databases and extract valuable data. Humans were involved only at a few critical chokepoints to give the AI prompts and check its work.

Claude, like other major large language models, comes equipped with safeguards to prevent it from being used for this type of activity, but the attackers........

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