Influence Ops

2 items across 2 editions. First seen Fri 11 Sep, last seen Sat 12 Sep. Traced across 1 weekly review.

How this story has evolved

From the week in review: the connections, developments and open questions filed under Influence Ops, newest week first.

Week of 7–13 September 2026

Development · Thu 10 Sep, Fri 11 Sep

Anthropic threat report: a Russian espionage actor automated attacks on more than 20 organisations; an influence-for-hire network published 8,913 articles

Anthropic published "Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026" on 10 September, covering activity disrupted between December 2025 and August 2026 across seven harm areas. GTG-20006, whose attribution Anthropic says "is consistent with public reporting linking the actor to Midnight Blizzard", appeared in operations against "more than 20 distinct organizations" — government ministries, defence and intelligence bodies, embassies and defence-industrial companies "concentrated in Ukraine and Europe but extending to the Middle East and maritime related government agencies in Asia".

Saturday, 12 September 2026

Defense One: Anthropic found a Russian group using Claude to build drone targeting that detonates without a human in the loop harmfulCompany claimUpdate

Defense One·Anthropic

Defense One reported on 11 September at 06:53 pm ET that, per Anthropic, a Russian "freelance" group tracked as GTG-27005 used Claude to build a model letting a drone "select targets (including a 'person' target class) and issue detonation commands without a human in the loop", plus software for autonomous drone-to-drone communication to improve targeting.
The group had not deployed the system operationally but conducted "real hardware-in-the-loop testing within their sessions" — the step between a design document and a fielded weapon.
A second group, GTG-84005, used Claude to extract census and public information to tailor messaging at specific audiences in Malaysia, where Defense One says it "laundered Russian and Chinese state media as independent reporting".
Defense One sets this against reductions in US counter-influence capacity: Attorney General Pam Bondi dissolved the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force, Secretary of State Marco Rubio shuttered the State Department's Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference hub, and the 2025 White House AI Action Plan removed references to misinformation. The attribution and capability claims are Anthropic's and are not independently verified.

AI in weapons targeting Anthropic Autonomous Weapons Influence Ops Threat Intel Military

Friday, 11 September 2026

Anthropic report: commercial influence-as-a-service operation published 8,913 articles in ~20 languages across 70 fake news sites harmful

Anthropic

GTG-54002, which Anthropic attributes to a France-based firm it calls LKM Company, ran "approximately 70 fabricated news websites," 70 matching X/Twitter accounts and more than 250 inauthentic commenting accounts, and "published at least 8,913 articles in about 20 languages" across six continents, with the United States, Brazil, France and the Democratic Republic of Congo among the targets.
A separate cluster, GTG-84005, attributed to Istanbul-based BBS Bilisim Teknolojileri, managed "roughly a thousand fake X/Twitter social media accounts" and profiled voters across "all 222 Malaysian parliamentary constituencies" using census and electoral data, exploiting race, religion and royalty as wedge issues.
What is new here is the business model: manipulation sold as a commercial service to clients, rather than run in-house by a state. Anthropic rates both operations Category Two on the Breakout Scale — meaning no measured spread beyond the operations' own platforms — so reach should not be inferred from article counts.
The article and account totals are Anthropic's counts of activity on its platform, not an independent audit of the networks.

Anthropic Influence Ops Threat Intel Elections