Anthropic Says AI Is Making Cyberattackers More Dangerous After Banning 832 Accounts
By Israel Usulor
As AI models get more sophisticated and capable of executing complex tasks with little human interference, concerns have continued to mount about what the future holds for the world economy should malicious actors successfully misuse them.
AI models are increasingly capable of performing tasks that previously required significant human involvement. Now, less-skilled bad actors are deploying AI to assist their operations, making traditional threat-assessment methods less reliable.
In a blog post published on June 3, 2026, Anthropic said it had banned 832 accounts between March 2025 and March 2026. According to the frontier lab, the accounts were “banned for malicious cyber activity.”
Anthropic, which recently confidentially filed a draft S-1 for a proposed IPO, stated that it had analysed the 832 accounts and activities in them and concluded that “malicious actors are using AI in ways that make them more dangerous. More specifically, threat actors are using AI in the later, more complex stages of their cyber operations.”
The company said “cyberattacks are becoming more autonomous” due to the use of AI to coordinate many parts of the attacks by bad actors.
Anthropic explains how AI makes attackers more dangerous
A breakdown of the 832 accounts banned by Anthropic shows that most of them used AI to prepare for cyberattacks. According to the analysis, 560 of the 832 accounts studied by Anthropic used AI to write malware. This number represents 67.3%. Also, 54 of the 832 accounts (6.5%) used AI to assist them with what is called “lateral movement”, which is a method used to penetrate deeper into a compromised network.
According to web security company Cloudflare, lateral movement is the process by which attackers spread through a compromised network after gaining initial access.
According to Anthropic, the activities of malicious actors who are assisted by AI are more dangerous because it increases the threat level of the attackers. “Across the period we studied, attackers’ use of AI shifted from techniques to gain initial access to a system towards activity carried out once they were inside the system,” it said.
Anthropic said the share of actors classified as medium risk or higher rose from 33% in the first six months of the analysis to 56% in the second half, suggesting that attackers are increasingly using AI for more sophisticated operations.
Industry experts agree that AI is growing more capable and increasingly deployed by bad actors, and that some companies may not yet be ready for defence. According to a 2025 State of Ransomware Survey carried out by CrowdStrike, a leading cybersecurity technology company, 76% of global organisations struggled to match the speed of AI-powered attacks.