Russian team ‘misused’ Claude AI to train a killer drone on scraped Ukrainian war footage

A farmer carries a part of a Russian FPV drone that he shot down with a rifle as he watches the burning field following an air attack in the Kharkiv region, Ukraine, August 2026. (AP Photo/Andrii Marienko) Russian team ‘misused’ Claude AI to train a killer drone on scraped Ukrainian war footage Published: September 15, 2026 5.04pm EDT Share article Print article A new threat intelligence report from the AI company Anthropic has revealed that a Russian team scraped Ukrainian combat videos to train an autonomous “kamikaze” drone to choose its own targets and destroy them. Anthropic’s report was published on Sept. 10, two days before CEO and co-founder of the company, Dario Amodei, published an essay arguing that humanity must urgently “slow the pace” of AI development. Read more: Cyber attacks? Bioterrorism? To ‘Pace the Frontier’ of AI effectively, we must improve our anticipatory thinking The report is a 154-page account of the attempted misuse of Claude AI models for “malicious activity” between December 2025 and August 2026. It covers seven areas: cyber operations, influence operations, surveillance, scams and fraud, biological misuse, conventional weapons development and distillation. One case, tracked as GTG-27005, describes a small, likely freelance team in Russia that used Claude’s coding tool to help build software for a swarm of autonomous first-person-view (FPV) “kamikaze” drones — the cheap, camera-guided munitions that have become one of the defining weapons of the war. Read more: Ukraine’s drone strikes are having an impact on Russia — but Russian leaders remain committed to war This should worry anyone who has ever filmed, shared or trusted footage from the war in Ukraine — one of the most visually documented conflicts in history. It seems that any visual footage — even that created by journalists, soldiers, civilians and researchers to update the outside world and hold nations accountable — can now feed back into a conflict as raw material for weapons development and deployment on the battlefield. Autonomous drone, can target a person A resident runs away from his burning car following a Russian FPV-drone strike in Kramatorsk, Donetsk region, Ukraine, on Sept. 2, 2026. (Iryna Rybakova/Ukraine's 93rd Mechanized Brigade via AP) Anthropic’s report states the company’s threat intelligence teams have “investigated and disrupted multiple threat actors” who used Claude models to develop software for either weapons design and development…