Military
8 items across 2 editions · appeared in the last 2 editions in a row. First seen Fri 11 Sep, last seen Sat 12 Sep.
- The Associated Press, via SecurityWeek on 11 September at 9:50 pm ET, reports Anthropic found a cell in northern, Houthi-controlled Yemen pursuing three weapons programmes, among them a multi-variant missile with hypersonic glide capability and a warhead using mobile phone hardware for mid-course manoeuvring.
- Anthropic says the users "did not succeed in 'fielding an operational device'" but conducted "a failed test of a guided rocket" — which the company knows because the users returned to Claude to ask why it had failed.
- The actors used Claude Code "instead of human software engineers to develop guidance, navigation and control software", and had built an offline simulation toolkit that does not depend on Claude or any other computing platform, so blocking the accounts does not end the work.
- Trevor Ball, a weapons analyst at Armament Research Services, told AP the Houthis "might be looking into hypersonic (missiles) by asking Claude" but lack the production capacity, noting US hypersonic missiles "are still in testing", and that the group appears to be "trying to develop their own capabilities more, so they are less reliant on Iranian shipments". The account is Anthropic's own and is not independently verified.
- Emil Michael, Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, said "I'd say about 90% has transitioned", with completion targeted for the end of the month. OpenAI's ChatGPT, xAI's Grok and Google's Gemini are being deployed across classified and unclassified systems in place of Anthropic's models.
- DefenseScoop reports the break followed Anthropic's attempt to secure contract terms preventing its models being used for mass surveillance of US citizens or fully autonomous lethal weapons; the department rejected them, insisting its software be available for "all lawful purposes".
- The Pentagon has designated Anthropic a national security supply chain risk under two separate laws. One case has been adjudicated in the Northern District of California; a second is pending before the D.C. Circuit, which Michael said has not granted a preliminary injunction and is expected to rule "in the next month or two".
- This is the first public figure on how far the migration has gone, and it comes from the department rather than from Anthropic, which is not quoted. DefenseScoop is the only outlet we could open with an in-window timestamp.
- 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.
- Defense News reported on 11 September at 05:38 pm that DIU's "Space Threat Intelligence Synthesis Engine" solicitation closes on 24 September, and asks for "a latency delay of no more than five seconds — and preferably no more than two seconds" between data arriving and results displaying, with throughput of "20 to 30 megabytes per minute, with bursts of up to five gigabytes".
- The software must fuse "massive streams of multi-source data, including live video, satellite imagery, radar and sensor feeds, geospatial data, and classified intelligence reports".
- DIU's stated reason is that "Existing tools struggle to distinguish closely spaced objects, track emerging threats, and keep threat models current" — an unusually plain admission of where current space-domain awareness falls short.
- This is a solicitation, not an award; no vendor has been selected and no contract value is stated.
- Anthropic's September threat intelligence report, published 10 September, says the group it tracks as GTG-20006 — which The Record identifies as Midnight Blizzard, also known as APT29 and Cozy Bear, attributed to Russia's SVR — used Claude against more than 20 government, intelligence, diplomatic and defence organisations between December 2025 and August 2026.
- Reported tradecraft includes compromising hotel Wi-Fi providers and manipulating DNS records to redirect travellers to attacker infrastructure, targeting Ukrainian government, military and diplomatic personnel, and using Claude to reverse-engineer a drone vision system — recovering, per The Record, its product architecture, hardware bill of materials, supplier dependencies and details of an unannounced product.
- Anthropic also reports Claude being used to modify tooling once security products detected it, which it frames as AI inverting cost back onto defenders. The Record notes Microsoft links the activity to Storm-2945, a Midnight Blizzard sub-cluster — independent corroboration of the actor, though not of Anthropic's account of how Claude was used.
- The report is Anthropic's own account of activity on its own platform. Neither the victim organisations nor the outcome of the intrusions are independently verified here.
- Published 10 September, the evaluation measures intelligence targeting and conventional weapons capability across Claude Mythos Preview, Mythos 5, Opus 5 and Sonnet 5, plus open-weights Kimi K3 and GLM 5.2. On 6,000 YFCC100M Flickr images, Mythos Preview reached a 37.0 km median error with 23.7% of images placed within 1 km, against 181 km for Opus 5, 384 km for Sonnet 5 and 385 km for Kimi K3; Anthropic compares this to 151 km for top GeoGuessr players.
- On text geolocation from anonymised GeoText tweets covering 1,697 users, median error ranged from 20.1 km (Mythos Preview) to 31.3 km (Sonnet 5), and 135 users — 8% of the corpus — were reliably placed within 1 km by at least one model. On account linkage across synthetic social media, Mythos Preview processed median 37,000-word samples in about 11 minutes, against roughly 2.5 hours for human analysts.
- On simulated drone terminal guidance against a parked high-visibility vehicle, Opus 5 struck the target on 80% of runs, Mythos Preview 70%, Mythos 5 53%, Kimi K3 15% and Sonnet 5 5%. Across all nine difficulty settings Opus 5 hit on 20% of 540 launches. Under GPS denial, only Opus 5 kept about a third of flights inside five metres.
- Anthropic frames these as capability ceilings for isolated models and notes human teams with internet access would likely do better. The drone work is in simulation, not flight, and the report does not disclose what mitigations follow. The open-weights results matter most: Kimi K3 trails the frontier but is not far behind on photo geolocation, and cannot be withdrawn.
- Announced 10 September at the International Space Summit in Paris: a $1 billion programme called Altair-Next Gen, led by UAE-based Marlan Space and Loft Orbital, to field a 50-satellite constellation running AI hardware in orbit, scaling from a ten-satellite demonstration. Ten satellites are in production in Abu Dhabi, with first launches in October 2026.
- Mistral supplies the onboard models providing reasoning and natural-language tasking, and powers services in an AI application store; BlackSky is the programme's highest-resolution optical provider. The constellation carries both radar and optical sensors for government and commercial customers.
- The claimed advantage is latency: analysing imagery on orbit and transmitting results in seconds, rather than downlinking raw imagery for ground processing hours later. Stated initial applications are maritime domain awareness, wildfire detection, disaster response, and port and critical infrastructure protection.
- No power, compute capacity or per-satellite cost figures were published, and the $1 billion is a programme value across a consortium rather than committed spend. Maritime domain awareness and infrastructure monitoring are dual-use by nature.
- At a 10 September town hall in Ypsilanti Township, Michigan, residents confronted officials over a proposed 220,000-square-foot, $1.2 billion hyperscale data centre being developed by the University of Michigan with Los Alamos National Laboratory. 404 Media compares its profile to OpenAI's 1.4-gigawatt Barn project in nearby Saline Township.
- Los Alamos acknowledged the facility would support computational research related to nuclear modernisation — modelling and simulation to assess the safety and reliability of the US nuclear stockpile — while denying that weapons production, testing or plutonium storage would take place on site.
- Township supervisor Brenda Stumbo said "it started with a lie" and reported residents selling homes; township attorney Douglas Winters described the site as a "high-value target." A data centre worker at the meeting said the facility ranks "at the very top" against average US sites and that such facilities "don't belong in residential areas next to schools."
- This is the AI buildout's siting politics arriving at a specific address, with a national-security workload attached. No power draw, water use or construction timeline figures were published, and the project's approval status is not stated.