The CEO of AI safety and research company Anthropic has been asked to testify before the House Homeland Security Committee about a large-scale cyberattack campaign carried out by China-affiliated actors using the company's Claude AI.
The panel is requesting that CEO Dario Amodei appear on Dec. 17.
"Recent disclosures by Anthropic, combined with public reporting indicating that state-sponsored cyber actors from the People's Republic of China (PRC) manipulated Claude-based tools to automate substantial portions of a sophisticated cyber-espionage campaign, underscore the urgent need to understand how emerging AI-driven capabilities and the cloud systems that increasingly enable them can be misused against the United States," said Chair Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., in a letter Wednesday.
Reps. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., chair of the committee's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection subcommittee, and Josh Brecheen, R-Okla., chair of its Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability subcommittee, co-signed the letter.
"This development has direct implications for national security, as adversaries conducting AI-enabled intrusions today may seek to pair these techniques with future quantum decryption capabilities, enabling 'harvest-now, decrypt-later' operations that put government, defense-industrial, and critical infrastructure data at long-term risk."
In a Nov. 13 report, Anthropic said it detected suspicious activity in mid-September and uncovered a "highly sophisticated espionage campaign."
The hackers, likely a Chinese state-sponsored group, "manipulated our Claude Code tool into attempting infiltration into roughly thirty global targets and succeeded in a small number of cases," the company said. The operation targeted large tech companies, financial institutions, chemical manufacturers, and government agencies.
Anthropic added: "We believe this is the first documented case of a large-scale cyberattack executed without substantial human intervention."
Lawmakers also sent letters to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and Quantum Xchange CEO Eddy Zervigon requesting their testimony at a hearing on the future of AI cybersecurity.
Garbarino earlier this month warned that America's cyber borders are a new battlefield and said a whole-of-government approach that streamlines information sharing is essential to protecting the nation.
"I'm always concerned that the good work we do here falls in the wrong hands, which is why we have to be extra vigilant in making sure that we protect our critical infrastructure here at home to protect against these foreign actors if they get access to this technology," Garbarino told Bloomberg.
Solange Reyner ✉
Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.
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