The Bad Guy With An AI Named Claude

A lot of bad guys try to use Claude to do bad things. Mostly they fail. We think. Anthropic has disrupted a bunch of them, and offers an extensive report. If Anthropic is sharing the worst cases, or anything close to them, things are actually looking good on the misuse front for closed models, even better than I thought. This report covers activity we disrupted between December 2025 and August 2026 across seven harm areas: cyber operations, influence operations, surveillance, scams and fraud, biological misuse, conventional weapons development, and distillation. There’s a bit of Arson, Murder and Jaywalking there. One of these things, many would say, is not like the others. I do not agree, especially given the details we will see later, and given that distillation enables the other six via, as the report says, ‘driving performance on nearly every task’ via transfering Claude’s cognitive skills, without transferring its safeguards. Indeed, distillation is by far the most important…