Anthropic says it blocked possible attempts to use AI to develop bioweapons

Anthropic says it has blocked multiple accounts that used the company’s artificial intelligence models in ways that could support the development of biological weapons.

In a report published Thursday, the AI company known for its Claude model said it considers biological misuse one of the “most serious risks” to artificial intelligence models.

The new report outlines five real-life case studies in which users “circumvented controls” that block users from specific regions and “engaged in other efforts to obfuscate the purpose of their research to evade our safeguards.” The examples include possible gain-of-function research and involve both infectious diseases, such as bird flu, and novel venoms and toxins.

Looking over 30 days of activity, Anthropic said, it identified about 35 “distinct research efforts” with potentially concerning activity. However, it acknowledged that it could not be certain whether the actors “intended harm” or were conducting research for legitimate scientific purposes. Anthropic said individuals in the case studies were “working scientists,” but did not identify the research institutions or countries where the activities took place.

“Sophisticated attacks no longer require sophisticated attackers,” the new report says. “The cybersecurity skills of AI models means that AI has collapsed the labor and tooling gap that used to separate well-resourced, state-sponsored operations from individual operators.”

One of the case studies detailed in the report involved a request for assistance writing a grant application for funding of gain-of-function research on the transmissibility and immune evasion of the chikungunya virus.

In another case, a researcher outside the US was using Claude for work on bird flu that focused on viruses’ adaptation to mammals and how it caused severe illness.

The report also details cases on research into orthopoxviruses – a group that includes variola, which causes smallpox, and mpox – as well as venom toxins.

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Drug development is considered one of the most promising and optimistic applications of AI; leaders in the industry often point to its potential to cure cancer and other diseases. But the same features that make AI powerful for discovering new materials and medications to help people could also make it useful for developing bioweapons in the hands of bad actors.

Anthropic said that it wants its models to be useful for scientific research, but the latest models have become capable of much more complex work than earlier versions — and the potential for misuse rises with the potential benefits. It added that bad actors could try to use the beneficial biological uses of AI to “maintain a kind of ‘plausible deniability’” about potentially harmful research.

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