How hackers used Claude for missiles, drone swarms, and surveillance, while Chinese labs mined it for training data

Anthropic's threat report covering December 2025 through August 2026 documents misuse of Claude across seven categories, including espionage, surveillance, weapons development, and unauthorized distillation. Alibaba ran the largest measured distillation campaign, extracting over 151 million exchanges to train its own models, while DeepSeek rerouted more than 12.1 million customer requests to Claude Opus. Affected models included Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus; newer Fable and Mythos appeared in one distillation case. Anthropic plans stricter safeguards and verified-user access.