Zvi on Anthropic's misuse report: Chinese labs' distillation is the real threat
Don't Worry About the Vase (Zvi) · rss · 2026-09-15
Zvi Mowshowitz breaks down Anthropic's threat intelligence report covering December 2025–August 2026 across seven harm areas. Key takeaways:
- Most malicious actors remain unsophisticated; AI's main effect is turning 'bad at job' into 'good at job.'
- Fraudulent distillation is the report's most consequential threat: all top Chinese labs allegedly tried to distill Claude, with DeepSeek, Moonshot and Xiaomi sending real user queries — Moonshot reportedly passed outputs to users as Kimi results; Zhipu failed against Fable and moved to Opus.
- Notable cases: Midnight Blizzard-linked Russian espionage automating evasion and phishing against Ukrainian targets; ShinyHunters 'vibe hacking'; a Chinese-speaking op running Claude agent swarms for vulnerability research against 50 organizations; a Russian-speaking actor prompt-injecting 30 companies hunting pre-release Claude access; nine influence-op networks built with Claude, though defenders are mostly winning.
- Zvi also flags Trump declaring AI existential risk a 'hoax' as very bad news.
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