Iran used American-developed artificial-intelligence models to try to target U.S. Navy ships in the Middle East, according to an Anthropic report warning of emerging national-security dangers.

The Iranian-linked group compiled information from ship and aircraft transponders, military photographs and commercial satellite photos to track American warships and look for vulnerabilities in their ship-born communications, the report found.

Anthropic said it disrupted the adversary's plot, which used the advanced AI Claude model.

The finding was one of several threats outlined in the 154-page report that offered up a playbook of how U.S. adversaries are using AI in novel ways that pose serious threats to national security: developing new missiles and aggressive disinformation campaigns, spying on dissidents, and even pursuing the potential development of biological weapons.

The allegations come amid a nationwide debate on whether policymakers fully grasp the threats and changes that AI poses to national security in the coming decades.

Anthropic's rules don't allow it to be used to build weapons, conduct surveillance or carry out violence. But people often sought to obscure their intentions and persistently tried new approaches when Claude rejected their requests.

A top researcher at Anthropic quit this week over fears that AI companies were developing systems they couldn't control, while other Anthropic employees warned that AI could wipe out humanity if not properly contained.

"We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!" Evan Hubinger, another top scientist at Anthropic wrote in a social-media post. "I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to," he said.

In its latest report on detecting and countering the misuse of AI, Anthropic said it identified and disrupted efforts to use its AI models to develop biological weapons, though it didn't specify which countries or foreign governments were linked to these efforts. "Without the correct safeguards, such capabilities could have catastrophic consequences," the Anthropic report said.

In another case, Anthropic said a group in northern Yemen used Claude to develop guidance software for high-end weapons including a multistage ballistic missile. Yemen is home to the Houthi rebel group, which has emerged as one of the strongest Iran-aligned groups in the Middle East and recently made gains to consolidate control over the strategic Bab al-Mandeb waterway that acts as a chokepoint for energy shipments through the Red Sea.

"Our safeguards blocked many of their requests, but not all of them," the Anthropic report said of the Yemeni weapons-development efforts. The company said it banned the accounts associated with this effort, shared the information with government partners and developed new detection protocols to reduce the future risk of misuse.

Anthropic said it also identified a Chinese-government aligned operation that used Claude to track and surveil Uyghurs-an ethnic minority primarily based in Western China. One focus, in particular, was Uyghurs who have joined the newly formed Syrian Army.

The Chinese operation also undertook a campaign of mass reporting and bot-network amplification against journalists from the Uyghur diaspora, according to Anthropic. The U.S. declared the repression of Uyghurs by the Chinese government a genocide in 2021.

Another group of accounts linked to the Chinese government used Claude to develop dossiers of religious leaders across Asia that Beijing views with suspicion. This included senior Catholic cardinals across Asia, the leadership of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan, members of Tibetan Buddhist civil society and the administration in exile, according to the report.

Russia-based actors also attempted to use Claude to build autonomous killer drone swarms using data from Ukrainian battlefields and develop disinformation campaigns by distributing AI-generated Russian-aligned state propaganda in resource-rich countries in central Africa, including the Central African Republic and Democratic Republic of Congo.

"We hope that the findings in this report will help other developers recognize similar patterns on their own platforms, give governments and civil society a clearer view of how emerging threats take shape, and strengthen collective defenses," Anthropic wrote in its report.