Russia is weaponizing US-built AI to make killer drones, cyberattack bots, and fake news

Kremlin-backed actors used Anthropic’s Claude AI to program autonomous lethal drones, improve hacking and influence operations, and avoid detection, the company said Thursday.

The report from the U.S.-based AI company is only the latest warning from firms, think tanks, and others that Russia, China, Iran and others are using made-in-America tools to attack targets around the world.

Anthropic reports that a Russian “freelance” group known as GTG-27005 used Claude to build an AI model small enough to work on single-board computers but powerful enough to enable a drone to “select targets (including a ‘person’ target class) and issue detonation commands without a human in the loop.” The group also used Claude to create software to allow autonomous drones to communicate with one another to improve targeting, Anthropic’s report says. While the Russian group had not yet deployed the model to the field, they were “using real hardware-in-loop testing within their sessions,” according to the report. The company banned the group, incorporated the findings of the investigation into its safeguards, and shared details with industry groups. 

Anthropic also said it had spotted Chinese and Yemeni groups trying to use Claude to design conventional weapons, efforts that Anthropic said it disrupted.

The report also detailed how foreign groups were using Claude in elaborate data theft and disinformation campaigns. It said its tools had been used to dig up information about targets, find vulnerabilities in their online accounts, create malware to bypass security and steal data, cover their tracks, and spread disinformation.

“We’ve seen groups of actors use Claude to build networks of fake social media profiles and entire news sites,” the report said.

The campaigns bear the hallmarks of Russian influence campaigns, such as the use of fake news sites and journalist profiles to spread lies about NATO activity in the Baltics. But the U.S.-built AI tools helped streamline the process, boosting the amount of disinformation and  creating fake reporters that were much more believable to local audiences. Russian-linked groups “automated much of their operations from development, infrastructure acquisition, phishing, persistence through command and control, to data exfiltration,” the report said. The group even used AI to forge documents from the Central African Republic Gendarmerie and Ministry of Defense.

Another group, GTG-84005, used AI to steal census and public information that allowed its agents to tailor their messaging campaigns to specific audiences in Malaysia, where the Turkish group “laundered Russian and Chinese state media as independent reporting.”

Thursday’s Anthropic report comes two weeks after rival frontier lab OpenAI revealed that Russian actors used ChatGPT to create a fake “expert community”—the “International Burke Institute”—to push talking points to international audiences.

While Anthropic and OpenAI were able to disrupt the schemes they discovered, such operations are likely to continue as Russia uses AI to “scale production of content that aligns with Kremlin narratives,” according to an August report from the Institute for the Study of War, or ISW.

Russia is also using young people’s curiosity about AI to grow the number of humans spreading Russian disinformation, offering young people around the world “AI media internships and training” through university donations and related programs.

Where is the US pushback?

A recent article from New America notes that AI is giving authoritarian regimes a powerful new tool to distort global understanding of geopolitical events.

“Authoritarian regimes are early adopters in using AI to bend the arc of reality in their favor,” write Daniel Kimmage, the former acting coordinator and principal deputy coordinator of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, and Darjan Vujica. 

It’s the kind of thing the U.S government used to establish and run organizations to push back on, they note. But such efforts have been undermined or brought to a halt under the second Trump administration. Less than a month after taking office, Attorney General Pam Bondi dissolved the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, the unit dedicated to investigating foreign disinformation and influence campaigns. Two months later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio shuttered the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference hub, known as R/Fimi.

And: “The 2025 White House AI Action Plan calls explicitly for removing any references to misinformation,” note Kimmage and Vujica. 

At least when it’s made by foreigners.

“The Trump administration has enthusiastically embraced AI-generated imagery in politically divisive posts,” they write.