New Delhi : AI tools are quite advanced today. But as companies like Anthropic and OpenAI continue to make more advanced AI models, the risk of potential misuse has only increased. Anthropic goes through a series of attempts which it managed to disrupt between December 2025 to August 2026. Claude Haiku, Sonnet and Opus models were used in the cases the company outlined. Anthropic said none of the misuse cases involved Claude Fable or Mythos-class models, except for one distillation case.
Anthropic stated that it chose to proceed with caution, arguing that valid biological research can overlap with work that could help create dangerous pathogens. “You are not seeing someone in a comic book kind of way say, ‘Hey, I want to build a biological weapon to kill everybody,’” Jacob Klein, Anthropic’s head of threat intelligence, said in an interview. “It’s an incredibly nuanced situation.”The company explained the proposed research involved engineering mutations that would make the virus more harmful as it repeatedly infected live animals.
The case was blocked by its biological safety classifier, but that the user then routed around the control through a third-party evasion platform that later added a fallback to a competitor’s model when Claude would not comply. In another case, Anthropic revealed that a reseller relay serving unrelated customers allowed one user to draft an orthopoxvirus immune-evasion grant application from start to finish on Opus 5 in about an hour. Orthopoxvirus is a family of viruses that causes human illness, including smallpox.
The company banned the accounts and, in biological cases, relied not only on bans but also on hard refusals, downgrading to weaker model tiers and proactive sweeps. Apart from biological weapons, Anthropic says, they also found attempts to use The Claude to develop software for conventional weapons, including firearms, missiles, armed drones and bombs. As per the company, it spotted three cases in China, two in Russia and one in Yemen.
Weapons are not the only area of focus for those looking to misuse AI tools like Claude. It seems that many groups want to use AI to run mass surveillance operations. Anthropic recorded nine such instances. In one case, a group with suspected links to China used Claude to track, profile and recruit Uyghur populations and journalists with ties to the Syrian Army. The company said the operation used bulk data from monitored WhatsApp and Telegram chats to build profiles, and Claude was also used for real-time translation and role-playing to test deception.
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