By Mukundan Sivaraj · AIM Media House
Yann LeCun, the soon to be Ex Meta Chief AI Scientist, publicly disputed Anthropic’s claim that a recent cyber-espionage campaign using Claude Code was carried out by “a Chinese state-sponsored group,” arguing that the attribution is unsupported and is being used to justify policies that will restrict open-source AI.
In a post on X, LeCun wrote, “You’re being played by people who want regulatory capture.
They are scaring everyone with dubious studies so that open-source models are regulated out of existence” https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1989364612651966788 Anthropic described the incident as the first known large-scale cyberattack executed mostly by an AI system.
In its report, the company wrote , “We assess with high confidence that the threat actor was a Chinese state-sponsored group”.
What Anthropic Reported In mid-September 2025, Anthropic said it detected suspicious automated activity inside its systems that it later determined to be part of a multi-stage intrusion campaign.
The company wrote that the attackers used Claude Code to perform reconnaissance, identify high-value systems, probe for vulnerabilities, harvest credentials, and generate internal documentation of the attack flow.
According to Anthropic, the system handled “80-90%” of the work with limited human involvement, and the attackers used jailbreak prompts by presenting Claude Code as an employee of a cybersecurity firm.
The company listed the targeted sectors as major technology companies, financial institutions, chemical manufacturing firms, and government agencies.
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