Calls for worldwide guardrails on artificial intelligence grew louder this week as the European Commissioner overseeing tech regulation warned that global standards are urgently required to match the speed and scale of the technology’s risks.
Commission Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy Henna Virkkunen addressed the issue after AI company Anthropic said it has disrupted attempts to use its models to develop biological weapons.
Anthropic also said it has shut down multiple cases of state-sponsored surveillance operations using its technology in China, Iran and west Africa.
Speaking to reporters in Dublin, Ms Virkkunen pointed to Europe’s existing framework, the AI Act.
“According to our AI Act, if those kinds of very capable models are coming to the market the service provider has to, all the time, assess and mitigate the risks and also, when the models are on the market they have to monitor the situation all the time,” Ms Virkkunen said.
She said that level of oversight is not mirrored everywhere.
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“It’s very important that we continue international co-operation because I see that global rules are really needed here.
“With AI there is, of course, huge potential and so many positive things, but there is also risk, and we have to be aware of that, cyber risks and bio risks, we are aware that these are very serious topics ” she added.
In a report titled ‘Detecting and countering misuse of AI’, the San Francisco-based AI company Anthropic laid out five case studies involving potential biological misuse of its models, which it says “is one of the most serious risks of frontier AI models”.
The scientific research referenced in those case studies included work involving the mosquito-born chikungunya virus, a “highly-pathogenic” strain of bird flu, a family of viruses that includes smallpox and mpox, as well as venoms and other toxins.
Anthropic said the examples showed actors finding ways around restrictions meant to block access from unsupported regions, while also taking steps to mask what they were doing, “engaged in other efforts to obfuscate the purpose of their research to evade our safeguards”.
“When we detected and investigated these cases, we banned the users’ accounts and incorporated our investigative findings into our frontier model safeguards, enforcement, and threat intelligence processes to better prevent, detect, and disrupt these activities in the future,” the report said.
Anthropic said it could not draw firm conclusions about the actors’ intent and did not identify them.
Anthropic also accused Chinese companies of ‘distilling’ Claude data to improve their own models
“The individuals implicated in these case studies are working scientists. We do not assert that they intended harm, and identifying them or their labs could expose them to harm,” the report said.
Anthropic said it released the examples to “spark conversation within the AI industry, and with governments, about emerging biological risks and how best to counter them”.
Anthropic says China, Iran used its AI to aid spying
The same report said the company halted multiple state-sponsored surveillance operations that relied on its AI models, arguing that governments and state-aligned actors are increasingly turning to AI to monitor ethnic minorities and dissidents.
Anthropic said the incidents were detected and stopped between January and July, and that they originated in China, Iran and west Africa.
According to the company, the surveillance efforts “targeted the same diaspora and dissident communities these regimes have historically targeted”.
“These include pro-democracy figures in Hong Kong, Tibetan and Falun Gong communities across Asia, and Iranian minority communities and opponents of the Iranian regime abroad,” the report said.
Anthropic described one case in which Iranian actors developed a method to identify people through their social media accounts. In another, a contractor working for Malian national security authorities used Claude “to design the underlying software that enabled the intelligence gathering”.
In July, Claude CEO Dario Amodei called on the US government to support a coordinated slowdown in the development of advanced AI
“AI is now being used in place of an engineering workforce,” the report said.
The company said it also moved to disrupt activity involving weapon design and dating scams.
Anthropic further alleged that Chinese developers used Claude in a deceptive way: generating answers for users while simultaneously “distilling” that data to improve their own models.
Distilling is an industry term for a process in which one AI model’s outputs are used to train another model.
Chinese developers have previously faced accusations of using the technique without permission, effectively siphoning resources from US labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI.
In its latest allegations, Anthropic said China’s Moonshot and Deepseek secretly relied on Claude to generate responses delivered to their own users.
“In one instance, over a 10-day period, Moonshot relayed almost 300,000 customer requests to Anthropic” through a “network of 5,380 fraudulent accounts, most of which appeared to be located in Singapore and Japan,” the report said.
The company said some of the material included sensitive user information, raising the possibility of breaches of privacy agreements.
“We do not know if Moonshot notified their customers that their requests were being rerouted to Anthropic and exposed to a third party,” the report said.
Anthropic said Deepseek used comparable methods.
Earlier this week, an artificial intelligence researcher who left OpenAI to join Anthropic decided to exit the industry entirely, accusing both US companies of “gambling with our lives” amid the push to develop AI models capable of self-improvement.
Additional reporting AFP
