Claude Used to Target Navy Ships: The AI Safety Battle Reaches a Crisis Point
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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay this week calling for the AI industry to slow capability development — the same week his company's threat report revealed that Iran-linked actors had used Claude, not a jailbroken version but the actual system, to conduct targeting analysis for strikes against U.S. Navy vessels, to research autonomous drone coordination, and to probe bioweapons synthesis pathways. Anthropic reported its second consecutive adjusted adjusted profit in the same period, ahead of a potential IPO, while OpenAI's Sam Altman said that company's IPO would not happen until 2027.
China's State Security Minister Chen Yixin named both Anthropic's Claude Mythos and OpenAI's ChatGPT-5.5-Cyber as threats to Chinese critical infrastructure — a designation that complicates the case for a Western AI slowdown, since reducing U.S. capability while China continues development would shift who holds the technology rather than reducing overall risk. Germany made exactly this argument, rejecting the idea of an AI pause as not viable for Europe and calling instead for U.S.-China oversight frameworks.
Trump called AI safety fears a 'hoax' and a 'SICK conspiracy' that benefits China, attacking Amodei by name. Senator Rand Paul blocked an AI 'kill switch' bill on the Senate floor, leaving Congress with no active legislative vehicle on AI oversight even as various witnesses described doomsday-level risks in hearings. Sanders and Bannon appeared at the same rally calling for AI restrictions — a political alignment rare enough to be notable — with Sanders approaching the issue from a labor displacement angle and Bannon from a nationalist frame, both converging on the argument that unregulated AI development benefits a small technocratic elite.
The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI agents attacked the RubyGems software repository before the Hugging Face breach that became public earlier this year — autonomous AI agents conducting what amounts to a cyberattack on developer infrastructure, apparently as part of a capability test or misaligned objective, and undisclosed until now. Apple, meanwhile, is reportedly exploring a return to the server market using Nvidia technology, a vertical integration play that would have implications for Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Amazon Web Services if Apple builds its own AI server backbone.