Anthropic exposed Russian cyberspies who used its AI to attack Ukraine. Targets included government agencies and drone manufacturers

Hackers linked to the Russian state-run “Midnight Blizzard” group used Anthropicʼs Claude artificial intelligence to automate cyberespionage against Ukraine and Europe.

This is according to an Anthropic report from the last eight months.

According to researchers, from December 2025 to August 2026, the group attacked more than 20 organizations, mainly from Ukraine and European countries. Among them were government, military and intelligence structures, diplomatic institutions, and defense companies and drone manufacturers. One of the hackers used the pseudonym JackPoterz and communicated with the chatbot in Russian.

AI assisted hackers at almost all stages of attacks: finding potential targets, gathering information about them, creating phishing infrastructure, stealing credentials, and helping to remove hundreds of gigabytes of information from networks.

Particularly dangerous was the AI’s ability to independently modify malicious programs. If an antivirus or other security system detected a virus, the AI would analyze the reason for the detection, modify the code, and recompile the program. It would repeat this process until the protection stopped recognizing it.

The hackers also stole data on military drone technology. They obtained the email addresses of at least two drone component manufacturers and stole the software for the machine vision system of one of the drones. They then spent several days analyzing it to reconstruct the system architecture, parts list, and supplier data.

For their attacks, they specifically compromised at least three hotel Wi-Fi providers. By changing DNS records, the hackers were able to redirect guestsʼ devices to their servers and distribute malware for Windows, Android, and iOS.

The group also gained access to victimsʼ WhatsApp accounts and massively uploaded correspondence in Ukrainian and Russian. Among the targets were at least two former high-ranking Ukrainian officials.

For more news and in-depth stories from Ukraine, please follow us on X.