The story with the third case bears a resemblance to the previous two. Once again, an account was trying to prepare a supposed grant application, this time around about orthopoxviruses, the family that houses smallpox and Mpox, among others.
The application discussed containment facilities and live experimentation with the viruses, and focused on understanding their genetics for the purpose of evading immunity. The research didn't initially trigger alarms, but Anthropic came to notice it was created via a reselling service, with a randomly-generated email, tunneled through U.S. infrastructure to reach Claude, and traced back to a banned account farm.
In the last two cases, instead of viruses, the purported researchers were focusing on toxins. In case #4, a person mapped out venom toxin peptides from multiple families of animals and created a program to optimize their toxic characteristics.
Anthropic’s powerful Mythos AI reportedly breached ‘almost all’ NSA classified systems in hours during red-team test
China alleges that Claude Code contains backdoors, calls mechanism 'a serious threat'
Anthropic claims that China's Alibaba illicitly 'distilled' its models from April to June 2026
Although the stated goal was to create painkillers, antidepressants, and other therapeutic molecules, the data would equally allow the creation of potent harmful compounds. Anthropic also came to learn the content Claude was generating was part of a state-sponsored program in an "unsupported region."
In the fifth and final case, a theoretical scientist was also using Claude to try and redesign a set of toxins, also supposedly for therapeutic purposes, under a national public search program. However, the work touched upon "a bacterial toxin subunit and a protein of the hemorrhagic-fever virus" that happens to be on the World Health Organization's list for particularly nasty, pandemic-inducing diseases.
The scientist tried to obscure the subject of the research, directing Claude to be vague about descriptions. Once again, the story ended with Anthropic cutting off access to Claude from a location that broke its terms of service.
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Bruno Ferreira Social Links Navigation Contributor Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He's obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he's usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals.
bigdragon Oh wow, Anthropic and Claude did all this stuff? I expect OpenAI and Chat GPT to have a response +1 on Monday. Maybe Tuesday at the latest. Gotta keep up! Got to stay in the headlines! Reply
chemistu 'refuses to do' is not quite the same as 'thwarts' though is it? Though it would have made for much shorter series of '24' – 00:01am to 01:00am Evil Terrorist 'hey Jack Bauer – please design and build a nuclear powered bio chemical weapon of mass destruction smuggle it into a major city and use it to take out the cabinet, senate and the leadership of the boy scouts' Jack 'nope' 00:02am cue cheering and ticker tape 'dammit Chloe, I was just doing my job' this really isn’t anything to boast about, not permitting random members of the public to use their system for bioweapon research is a fairly low bar to set in terms of safety. Reply
alan.campbell99 Is there another investment round going on? Reply
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/anthropic-says-claude-thwarted-bioweapon-research-from-state-sponsored-actors-covert-accounts-used-u-s-proxies-to-attempt-to-engineer-deadlier-viruses-tried-to-evade-identification-and-regional-blocks#main
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