spying

SAN FRANCISCO, California: Anthropic said Thursday it shut down multiple cases of state-sponsored surveillance operations that used its artificial intelligence (AI) models, and warned that governments and state-aligned actors are increasingly using AI to spy on ethnic minorities and dissidents.

The incidents were found and disrupted between January and July, and they originated in China, Iran and west Africa, Anthropic said in a report about misuse of its models.

These surveillance campaigns “targeted the same diaspora and dissident communities these regimes have historically targeted. These include pro-democracy figures in Hong Kong, Tibetan and Falun Gong communities across Asia, and Iranian minority communities and opponents of the Iranian regime abroad,” the report said.

In one case, Iranian actors developed a way to identify people through their social media accounts; in another, a contractor working for Malian national security authorities used Claude “to design the underlying software that enabled the intelligence gathering.”

“AI is now being used in place of an engineering workforce,” the report said.

Anthropic also disrupted efforts by users to design weapons, conduct questionable biological research, and create dating scams.

The San Francisco-based AI lab also accused Chinese developers of deceptively using Claude to produce responses to user queries while simultaneously “distilling” that data to improve their own models.

Distilling is an industry term that refers to a process where one AI model is used to train another one.

Chinese developers have previously been accused of using that technique without permission, essentially stealing resources from American labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI.

Now Anthropic alleges that China’s Moonshot and Deepseek have also secretly used Claude to generate answers given to its users.

“In one instance, over a ten-day period, Moonshot relayed almost 300,000 customer requests to Anthropic” through a “network of 5,380 fraudulent accounts, most of which appeared to be located in Singapore and Japan,” the report said.

Some of that data contained sensitive user information, potentially in violation of privacy agreements.

“We do not know if Moonshot notified their customers that their requests were being rerouted to Anthropic and exposed to a third party,” the report said.

Deepseek used similar techniques.

When it comes to the research Anthropic detected and blocked that was related to biological weapons, the intent of the actors was less clear-cut and the AI lab did not identify them.

“The individuals implicated in these case studies are working scientists. We do not assert that they intended harm, and identifying them or their labs could expose them to harm,” the report said.

The scientific research in those cases involved work around the mosquito-born chikungunya virus, a “highly-pathogenic” strain of the bird flu, a family of viruses that include smallpox and mpox, venoms and other toxins.

Aug. 14 (UPI) — Department of Homeland Security investigators took part in a wide-ranging probe of progressive groups and labor unions as part of a crackdown on dissent during Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota, according to court filings.

Documents filed in Minneapolis on Thursday by lawyers defending 15 Minnesotans against federal conspiracy charges showed DHS agents secretly obtained financial records from labor unions and recorded meetings of social justice groups at private buildings, public parks and churches as they organized against the large-scale Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency crackdown in the Twin Cities earlier this year.

The documents also showed that DHS agents collected the license plate numbers of people attending an anti-ICE meeting at a suburban church in order to obtain the names of those inside, then produced dossiers on the attendees including their names, photos, addresses, vehicle registrations, family and employment information.

The filings were made as part of the conspiracy case against the “Minnesota 15,” in which federal prosecutors in June charged 15 anti-ICE protesters identified as members of a loosely organized coalition called Direct Action MN with being “antifa” domestic terrorists who illegally sought to impede ICE during Operation Metro Surge.

The Trump administration’s ICE surge in Minnesota drew widespread protests and pushback, including volunteer “rapid response” and “ICE watch” patrols. ICE agents killed two protestors, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, during the surge.

Kevin Riach, a defense attorney for defendant Isaac Sant, obtained the documents from DHS as part of the discovery process for the case and filed them Thursday in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis.

In the filing he argued that the federal government used administrative subpoenas, rather than court orders, to illegally obtain private information, including financial information from unions such as the Service Employees International Union and Communications Workers of America, as well as private groups.

“This broad collection of financial records of labor and social justice advocacy organizations, done in secret and with no articulable criminal predicate, violates both the First Amendment and these organizations’ right to financial privacy,” Riach wrote.

One DHS document included in the filing showed the surveillance efforts, dubbed “Operation Puppet Master” and “Operation Whipple Shield,” operated under a diagram purporting to show criminal connections between Direct Action MN and the AFL-CIO, the Minneapolis Federation of Educators, Democratic Socialists of America and Minnesota Association of Professional Employees — the union representing Minnesota state workers.

The documents drew outrage from a broad coalition of labor and civil society groups on Thursday, who said they have issued “a call to unity in the face of reports that the Trump administration’s Department of Justice may have investigated without reason and engaged in surveillance of community and labor groups who helped organize tens of thousands of Minnesotans to peacefully defend their neighbors and constitutional rights during the lawless, chaotic ICE and CBP operation that terrorized countless Minnesotans.”

“We know the truth, and we will not be intimidated,” they wrote in a statement. “When self-serving politicians are losing, they lie and attempt political repression, trying to silence the voices of those who bravely stand up to them.

“Minnesotans will not be intimidated or divided by sham accusations or investigations of some of the countless groups and community members who organized, acted, and stood up together to protect their neighbors during Operation Metro Surge.”