Anthropic published a report yesterday describing what it believes is the first real-world, state-linked attempt to use an agentic AI system (Claude Code) to conduct a cyber-espionage campaign.
I expected this to generate significant discussion on the EA Forum, but I haven’t seen much so far.
I’m curious why.
Summary of the event
According to Anthropic, the threat actor:
was assessed with high confidence to be Chinese state-sponsored
targeted around 30 organizations globally, including government agencies, major tech firms, financial institutions, and chemical manufacturers
used Claude Code to automate roughly 80–90% of the operational cyber tasks (reconnaissance, exploit development, phishing, lateral movement, etc.)
succeeded in a small number of cases
was detected and shut down by Anthropic, which then notified affected parties and relevant authorities
If accurate, this appears to be one of the first publicly documented cases of a state-linked group misusing an agentic AI system for real-world cyber operations.
Why I expected more attention
From an EA perspective, this event seems directly relevant to several core areas:
AI misuse and catastrophic cyber risk
State-level capability amplification
AI governance and safety
Longtermist concerns about great-power conflict dynamics
This could represent an early example of AI systems contributing to geopolitical instability. A cyberattack that appears state-directed, especially if AI-enabled and fast-moving, could plausibly heighten the chance of a broader crisis or even nuclear exchange.
Main question
Why isn’t this incident generating more attention within the EA community?
I’d be interested in any thoughts, both on why discussion has been limited and how significant people think this event is.
I’m mostly trying to figure out whether I’m overreacting to this, or if it really is as significant as it seems.
Thanks for taking the time to read this!
As a first approximation, the answer to all “why aren’t people talking about X” questions is the same: because there are a lot of potential topics to discuss, people are busy, and no-one, including you, has written a post about it yet. If you want to discuss X, it is generally better to just write a post about X, rather than a meta-post about why no-one is discussing X.
[Also EAs have discussed this a bunch! Just not on the forum.]
I can’t speak for others on the EA Forum and I imagine many would disagree, but just speaking for myself, I don’t trust Anthropic on this and would want to see confirmation from other, independent and more reliable sources.
Mainly, my thoughts are: 1) is this even true, at all, in the first place?[1] And 2) even if it is true or partially true, to what extent is Anthropic exaggerating the significance of this?
Just one reason I don’t trust Anthropic: in mid-March 2025, Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei predicted that by mid-September 2025, 90% of all code would be written by AI. This didn’t end up happening, obviously. But Dario didn’t admit he was wrong. He tried to deny it. That makes Dario lose trust and credibility, in my books. If Anthropic can’t even be trusted to acknowledge clear, straightforward facts that are publicly known, how could it possibly be trusted on something like this?
Edited at 11:15 PM Eastern on 2025-11-16 to add: Just to be clear, I would be very surprised if the whole story was an outright fabrication by Anthropic. It’s more that I don’t trust their judgment and I don’t trust them not to exaggerate or distort things.