China-linked actors used Claude for military weapons work, Anthropic says

Anthropic reports Chinese military researchers and companies used Claude to build 16 tools for suppressing enemy air defenses aimed at Taiwan and to draft anti-torpedo specifications. The same actors reportedly funneled 151 million training queries through Claude to distill its capabilities into Alibaba's own models.

Why it matters: This is the most detailed state-actor misuse case Anthropic has disclosed, extending beyond the previously reported Iran and Houthi rebel usage into direct military applications tied to a live geopolitical flashpoint. The distillation angle—using Claude outputs to train a rival's models—also sharpens the debate over whether frontier labs can gate access without effectively subsidizing competitors' model development.