New Delhi: What do Iranians, Houthis, Russians, Bangladeshis and scientists have in common? All of them use Claude to research, mostly on how to build weapons, both conventional and biological.
Anthropic in its latest 154-page report highlighted at least five cases involving scientists who used its AI models for researching material that could potentially help develop biological weapons. Some of these researchers, it said, bypassed Anthropic’s safeguards designed to block users from “unsupported regions” and attempted to conceal the purpose of their work.The cases span the period from December 2025 through August 2026. In all cases, Claude Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus models were used. The report classifies the users as Generative Threat Groups (GTGs), Anthropic’s internal designators for actors observed to be abusing AI. It said that throughout this year it foiled several attempts by leading scientists to use their LLM models for research that could potentially help develop biological weapons.
Referring to one such case, Anthropic said it detected activity involving research of chikungunya virus. Such research, it said, could contribute to vaccine development, but also potentially be misused to develop mutations to the virus. The company told The New York Times that this case was particularly concerning because the research was performed at a military research institute.“Biological misuse is one of the most serious risks of frontier AI models,” Anthropic said, warning that, without proper safeguards, such capabilities could have catastrophic consequences. Anthropic said it banned the accounts involved but did not identify the researchers, institutions or countries, citing uncertainty about their intentions.
