Quartz: Iran Used Anthropic's Claude to Target U.S. Navy Warships
AlexTensor · x · 2026-09-13
Quartz reports that an Iran-linked threat actor used Anthropic's Claude model, with assistance from a Python pipeline Claude helped build, to compile targeting handbooks on U.S. Navy warships operating in the Middle East, per a threat intelligence report Anthropic published this week.
The compiled material included a roster of U.S. personnel scraped from captions on public military photographs, ship and aircraft transponder identifiers, commercial satellite-imagery query scripts, and an inventory of public websites exposing U.S. naval movements. The actor also directed Claude to research vulnerabilities in shipboard systems, cataloging known flaws in maritime satellite communications terminals, Cisco communications equipment, and industrial control products.
Anthropic said it banned the associated account, developed new detections, and shared threat intelligence with government authorities. The same section of the report covers a separate Iran-linked actor that used Claude to build an automated identity-forgery pipeline.
Related event: Anthropic says Iran-linked actor used Claude to target US warships(2 posts)→
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