Anthropic said Thursday it has blocked efforts by bad actors to use its artificial intelligence models for malicious activity such as cyberattacks, surveillance, and research that could have led to biological weapons.
The lengthy report by the AI startup, which is planning an initial public offering this fall, was published two days after one of its researchers announced he’s resigning over concerns that Anthropic and its competitors are not acting responsibly in AI development. Anthropic released this report after one of its researchers, Jacob Coxon, announced he’s resigning amid fears the company and its chief rival OpenAI “are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. He echoed concerns raised inside and outside of the industry about the technology’s potential to elude human control. Among the findings in the company’s report are unnamed actors attempting to use its models for research that could have led to biological weapons. None of the cases Anthropic included in its report were found to be using its newer, more powerful Claude Fable or Mythos-class models, with the exception of one illicit distillation case that Anthropic described as “an industrial-scale, covert campaign to extract a model’s capabilities and replicate them in another model without authorization. Coxon’s post warned that some of his colleagues now believe AI could threaten human life by the end of the decade.
Anthropic said its older models, such as Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4.5, from 2025, “were well below the threshold where they could meaningfully assist a sophisticated user in carrying out dangerous biological research.
As AI models grow more powerful, elaborate cyberattacks no longer require sophisticated skills and even lone individuals can create threats that would not have been possible even a year ago, Anthropic said . The company said it has added stronger safeguards in its latest models to restrict biological research that could also be used to make weapons. In one instance, Anthropic said its systems blocked a request for Claude’s assistance in authoring a grant application for scientific funding. Because of this, Anthropic has applied “stronger safeguards that restrict access to a wide range of dual-use biological research queries” in its more recent models, such as Claude Fable 5, the report said.
