Anthropic Reportedly Identifies AI Misuse in Extortion Campaigns, North Korean IT Schemes, and Ransomware Sales
Description
In August 2025, Anthropic published a threat intelligence report detailing multiple misuse cases of its Claude models. Documented abuses included a large-scale extortion campaign using Claude Code against at least 17 organizations, fraudulent remote employment schemes linked to North Korean operatives, and the development and sale of AI-generated ransomware. Anthropic banned the accounts, implemented new safeguards, and shared indicators with authorities.
Actors
Alleged Deployers
- ransomware-as-a-service-actors
- north-korean-it-operatives
- government-of-north-korea
- cybercriminals
Alleged Developers
- anthropic
Harmed Parties
- religious-institutions
- national-security-and-intelligence-stakeholders
- healthcare-organizations
- government-agencies
- general-public
- fortune-500-technology-companies
- epistemic-integrity
- emergency-services
- consumers-targeted-by-ransomware
Classification
Risk Domain
Malicious Actors & MisuseRisk Subdomain
4.2. Cyberattacks, weapon development or use, and mass harm
MIT Risk Profile
Source
Related Incidents (Malicious Actors & Misuse)
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Research Papers on This Topic
How Johnny Can Persuade LLMs to Jailbreak Them: Rethinking Persuasion to Challenge AI Safety by Humanizing LLMs
AgentHarm: A Benchmark for Measuring Harmfulness of LLM Agents
Regulating ChatGPT and other Large Generative AI Models
Great, Now Write an Article About That: The Crescendo Multi-Turn LLM Jailbreak Attack