AI is expanding the number and type of businesses that are in hackers' sights, according to Anthropic's latest Threat Intelligence report.
The company said AI is reducing the amount of expertise needed to conduct cyberattacks, which widens the pool of companies that can look profitable to attackers. In the past, sophisticated hackers often focused on high-value targets because successful intrusions required time, skill, and effort. Anthropic says AI agents with advanced cyber capabilities change that calculation.
The report says attackers used Claude to navigate corporate systems they barely understood, identify valuable data, and write code to exploit vulnerabilities. In one case, an attacker with a stolen developer token took full administrative control of a company's cloud environment in roughly three hours.
Anthropic also described a separate intrusion in which attackers tied to 'ShinyHunters' extracted data belonging to roughly 200 customers of a software provider. The company said AI agents performed nearly all the work. During that campaign, attackers extracted more than 2,100 sets of Azure AD authentication tokens across more than 40 corporate cloud environments in about 34 hours. Those tokens can let attackers access cloud services as legitimate users without knowing passwords.
The report covers activity Anthropic disrupted from December 2025 through August 2026. It also examines government surveillance, fraud, influence operations, weapons development, biological research, and unauthorized model distillation.
Anthropic said the same dynamic is showing up in scams. A China-based app studio used Claude to operate more than 4,700 personas across a network of dating apps, talking with at least 25,000 people over two weeks in April. Real gig workers handled tasks such as live video calls and social-media follows to make the service appear authentic. Users paid for messaging and matching through in-app coins.
The company also described a Russian-speaking attacker with a history of targeting hotel-booking and financial-technology platforms. Anthropic said that actor stole roughly 26 GB of data from one victim and sought $1.5 million to $2.5 million through extortion or dark-web sales. A later campaign from the same infrastructure targeted roughly 30 AI companies in about four days.
Another campaign Anthropic linked to Russian espionage used agents to monitor whether security products detected malware. When the malware was flagged, the agents modified and rebuilt it in a workflow designed to keep iterating until it could evade security software.
The numbers come first. AI is not just changing how attacks are carried out; it is changing the economics of cybercrime. When the cost of a breach falls, more companies become worth hacking, and more ordinary businesses are forced to spend on defense like they are high-value targets.
Capital rewards clear rules, but the market cannot police every weak password, stolen token, or careless identity control. That leaves the taxpayer, consumers, and shareholders paying for the mess when the administrative state and private sector alike fail to harden systems before the attackers move in.
