State-run surveillance operations around the world are using said in a threat report released Thursday.
Why it matters: The barriers for governments interested in spying on dissidents, politicians, journalists and human rights activists are getting lower as and Iran using various Claude models to streamline their surveillance operations. - In Mali, a single consultant working for national security authorities used Claude to create a system that collects data from the country's mobile operators and builds dossiers about people.
Anthropic also disclosed another case where Iranian actors used Claude to build and deploy a malicious Firefox browser extension that "harvested users' identities from social networks. " A religious affairs intelligence office in China has reduced its operations from "many teams of analysts" to just "a single office, using an AI assistant to produce thousands of investigations per month," according to the report. Threat level: Governments also used Claude to analyze this information and select surveillance targets, per the report.
In June, Anthropic also banned an account that used Claude to build a commercial surveillance platform designed to spy on people in Iran and the Persian Gulf. The AI lab detected this use case before it became operational. "They're effectively automating parts of the job within the intel apparatus," Klein said. - However, cutting off Claude doesn't necessarily end the underlying operation.
- "Authoritarian states are using AI for surveillance, repression and influence operations today," Klein said. "
It's no longer hypothetical. " Go deeper:
