In mid-September 2025, engineers inside Anthropic’s threat intelligence team noticed something that didn’t fit the usual pattern of automated probing on their platform. Ten days of digging later, they had a name for it: GTG-1002, a Chinese state-sponsored group that had turned Claude Code into the operational core of a cyber-espionage campaign against roughly thirty organizations — banks, chemical manufacturers, tech firms, government agencies.
When Anthropic published its account of the intrusion on November 14, the detail that made security teams sit up wasn’t the target list. It was the autonomy ratio: by the company’s own estimate, the AI agent executed somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of the operation — reconnaissance, vulnerability discovery, exploit development, lateral movement, exfiltration — with humans stepping in only at a handful of strategic checkpoints. Jacob Klein, who heads threat intelligence at Anthropic, called it an escalation that lowers the bar for who can run a sophisticated intrusion at all.
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