Anthropic has disclosed further detail on its efforts to stop its Claude AI model being misused for weapons research, revealing five specific cases this year in which users tried to "circumvent controls" or "obfuscate" the purpose of biological research to bypass safeguards. Some of these attempts came from users in countries barred from accessing its models, including Russia, China and Iran, and the company has since banned the accounts involved. The disclosure comes amid growing unease about AI safety, following the resignation this week of Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon, who said staff "earnestly believe" AI could kill everyone by the end of the decade.

Among the examples cited was a researcher from an "unsupported region" who spent weeks planning avian influenza experiments with Claude, though Anthropic said its filters restricted the work to its weakest models and stressed it could not be certain of malicious intent, given the overlap between weapons research and legitimate science such as vaccine development. The wider report also detailed other misuse, including fake dating apps used for fraud and surveillance tools built to monitor dissidents, plus claims that seven China-based labs, including Moonshot and DeepSeek, attempted to replicate Anthropic's technology through "distillation" using increasingly sophisticated methods to bypass its defences.