Anthropic on Wednesday revealed that it disrupted a sophisticated operation that weaponized its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot Claude to conduct large-scale theft and extortion of personal data in July 2025.

"The actor targeted at least 17 distinct organizations, including in healthcare, the emergency services, and government, and religious institutions," the company said . "Rather than encrypt the stolen information with traditional ransomware, the actor threatened to expose the data publicly in order to attempt to extort victims into paying ransoms that sometimes exceeded $500,000."

"The actor employed Claude Code on Kali Linux as a comprehensive attack platform, embedding operational instructions in a CLAUDE.md file that provided persistent context for every interact

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