Anthropic Says Attacker Used AI Tool in Widespread Hacks

A hacker leveraged technology from Anthropic PBC as part of a vast cybercrime scheme that’s impacted at least 17 organizations, the company said, marking an “unprecedented” instance of attackers weaponizing a commercial artificial intelligence tool on a widespread basis.

The hacker used Anthropic’s agentic coding tool in a data theft and extortion operation that affected victims in the last month across government, health care, emergency services and religious institutions, according to the company’s August threat intelligence report published this week. The attacks using the Claude Code tool resulted in the compromise of health care data, financial information and other sensitive records with ransom demands ranging from $75,000 to $500,000 in cryptocurrency.