A lot of bad guys try to use Claude to do bad things. Mostly they fail. We think.

Anthropic has disrupted a bunch of them, and offers an extensive report. If Anthropic is sharing the worst cases, or anything close to them, things are actually looking good on the misuse front for closed models, even better than I thought.

This report covers activity we disrupted between December 2025 and August 2026
across seven harm areas: cyber operations, influence operations, surveillance, scams
and fraud, biological misuse, conventional weapons development, and distillation.

There's a bit of Arson, Murder and Jaywalking there. One of these things, many would say, is not like the others.

I do not agree, especially given the details we will see later, and given that distillation enables the other six via, as the report says, ‘driving performance on nearly every task’ via transfering Claude's cognitive skills, without transferring its safeguards.

Indeed, distillation is by far the most important threat in this report, and the part of the report that will have the most impact.

By exposing Chinese attempts at systematic fraudulent distillation of Claude, Anthropic has embarrassed and potentially antagonized the Chinese. [...]

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Outline:

(02:08) Breaking Unrelated News

(03:23) How To Not Tell a Fable

(03:58) Bad Dudes Tend To Be Relatively Unsophisticated

(05:45) Particular Bad Dudes

(08:09) Influence Operations

(13:09) Surveillance Operations

(15:22) Conventional Weapons

(17:30) Biological Misuse

(18:54) Scams and Fraud

(20:15) Illicit Fraudulent Distillation

(32:45) What You Gonna Do About It, Punk?

(34:53) Good News, Everyone

(35:39) A Very Different Read of The Report

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First published:
September 15th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qSjH9T83xCfWQkmk2/the-bad-guy-with-an-ai-named-claude

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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“The Bad Guy With An AI Named Claude” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“The Bad Guy With An AI Named Claude” by Zvi