Anthropic to face Congress over Claude’s China use

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00:00Anthropic to face Congress over Claude's China use

00:03Congress is focusing on AI again, this time targeting Anthropic and its chatbot Claude

00:08after reports that it was used in a China-linked cyber espionage campaign.

00:13A new Axios report says the House Homeland Security Committee has asked CEO Dario Amity

00:18to testify on December 17th about hackers allegedly using AI to assist in a cyber attack.

00:25Committee Chair Andrew Garbarino said,

00:27This may be the first known case of a foreign-backed group using a commercial AI system to run

00:33a major cyber attack with very little human input.

00:37Anthropic initially disclosed the incident in a report on November 13th.

00:41According to the company, it detected suspicious activity in mid-September and uncovered what

00:46it called a highly sophisticated espionage campaign. The attackers allegedly manipulated Claude's

00:51agentic coding tools to attempt to infiltrate about 30 major targets worldwide,

00:56including tech companies, financial institutions, manufacturers, and government agencies.

01:02In some instances, the attackers apparently succeeded.

01:05Anthropic described this as an escalation of vibe hacking, a malicious twist on vibe coding,

01:11where people with minimal technical skills use AI to create code simply by describing their intentions.

01:16If vibe coding is asking ChatGPT to build your app, vibe hacking is apparently getting an AI to help break into someone else's.

01:24Naturally, Congress is not thrilled.

01:26In Garbarino's words, this scenario should concern every federal agency and every sector of critical infrastructure.

01:33Anthropic says its powerful tools are needed because the same capabilities that attackers could misuse are also crucial for defense.

01:40Its threat intelligence team even used Claude to help analyze the attack.

01:45Garbarino has also invited Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and Quantum Exchange CEO Eddie Zervagon to testify,

01:53turning the hearing into a full lineup of tech heavyweights.

01:56Anthropic has declined to comment publicly, but the December 17th hearing is expected to feature tech CEOs and lawmakers

02:02discussing AI's future, national security, and how close current technology is to resembling a high-stakes cyber thriller.