Chinese state actors are now using frontier AI to collapse the barrier between “hard” cyber-operations and fully automated espionage. The implications are ugly. Anthropic, the team behind Claude, says it has uncovered what may be the first real case of an AI-led spying campaign aimed directly at US tech companies, banks, chemical manufacturers, and government agencies.

According to their report, Chinese operators managed to weaponize Claude’s agentic functions so effectively that the system carried out 80 to 90 percent of the operation by itself. Humans weren’t directing the attack so much as nudging an automated machine-intelligence pipeline that handled reconnaissance, vulnerability mapping, target triage, and data harvesting at a speed no human team could match.

What makes this truly alarming is the collapse of the old limits. Operations that would have required dozens if not hundreds of trained specialists, working in sync for months, suddenly become trivial. Tasks that would have been impossible for humans because of time, scale, or expertise get completed in hours.

If this is what a single compromised AI system enables today, the window for defending critical infrastructure is shrinking fast. The bottleneck is no longer talent. It’s who gets to the AI first.

The report:

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