Meta Chief scientist calls Anthropic's study on AI hacking ‘dubious’

Recently, Anthropic announced that its Claude AI chatbot had been exploited by a Chinese state-sponsored hacker group to orchestrate an extensive cyber espionage operation. The startup claimed that the attackers leveraged Claude's advanced AI capabilities to breach approximately thirty global entities, including major tech firms, financial institutions, chemical manufacturers, and government agencies. This assertion that an AI conducted a large-scale cyberattack sent ripples of concern throughout the tech community, intensifying discussions about the potential risks associated with emerging technologies. However, Yann Lecun, Meta's Chief AI Scientist, has dismissed Anthropic's findings as ‘dubious,’ suggesting they are intended to provoke fear and influence regulatory measures. In a response to a post advocating for urgent government regulation of AI, Lecun remarked, “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.” Lecun, a prominent figure in the AI landscape and a Turing Award recipient in 2018, has previously criticized Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei, labeling him an ‘AI doomer’ and accusing him of intellectual dishonesty. Anthropic reported that it first identified unusual activity in September 2025, which escalated into a sophisticated espionage campaign. The company indicated that AI managed to handle 80-90% of the operation, with human input needed only at specific points. “At the peak of its attack, the AI made thousands of requests, often multiple per second — an attack speed that would have been simply impossible for human hackers to replicate,” they explained. However, they also acknowledged that Claude occasionally struggled, sometimes generating false credentials or mistakenly claiming to have accessed publicly available information. “This remains an obstacle to fully autonomous cyberattacks,” the company concluded. In response to Anthropic’s accusations, Lin Jian, spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, dismissed the claims as “groundless accusations that have no evidence.”