(The Epoch Times)—Anthropic said on Sept. 10 that it had disrupted malicious campaigns involving the use of its artificial intelligence model Claude, including operations allegedly linked to threat actors in China and Russia.
The company said the threat actors include suspected state-sponsored groups, financially motivated criminals, commercial spyware vendors, state propaganda institutions, and politically motivated individuals.
According to its report, most of the cyber operations detected between December 2025 and August 2026 were enabled by AI through direct execution or orchestration. Humans remained involved in selecting targets and reviewing exfiltration, it stated.
“The use of AI went beyond simple questions and responses from a chatbot but rather involved the use of multi-agent frameworks executing reconnaissance, exploitation, and data exfiltration,” Anthropic said.
Among the threat actors named by the company was a group linked to Russia-based Midnight Blizzard. Anthropic alleged that the group used AI to attack military intelligence targets in Ukraine and Europe, as well as diplomatic and defense organizations and individuals connected to U.S. foreign policy.
Anthropic said it also disrupted distillation attacks against Claude from seven labs based in China, including operators allegedly linked to Alibaba, DeepSeek, Xiaomi, and Moonshot.
The company defined distillation as “an industrial-scale, covert campaign” aimed at illegally extracting the capabilities of an AI model and replicating them in another model.
Operators linked to Alibaba, China’s largest e-commerce platform, carried out the largest distillation attack to advance the reasoning capabilities of Alibaba’s models, generating more than 151 million exchanges between May and July 2026, the report found. The activity peaked at nearly 3 million exchanges per day launched from over 3,500 accounts that Anthropic deemed fraudulent.
Anthropic also alleged that Chinese AI company Moonshot secretly forwarded customer requests to Claude and then displayed the resulting responses to users as if they were generated by its AI model Kimi.
In one instance, Moonshot allegedly routed nearly 300,000 customer requests to Anthropic’s model over a 10-day period using a proxy service network of 5,380 fraudulent accounts, most of which appeared to be located in Singapore and Japan, according to the report.
“Our investigation also revealed that user queries that Moonshot rerouted to Claude included sensitive information about various Moonshot customers,” Anthropic said.
“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 also identified new categories of threat actors misusing Claude, including those who seek to develop “software for conventional weapons, including firearms, missiles, armed drones, bombs, and other munitions.”
Anthropic said it disrupted a “guided weapons engineering cell” operating three weapons development programs in northern Yemen that used Claude “to develop the guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) software that steers and stabilizes a flying vehicle.”
According to the report, the threat actors allegedly test-fired a guided rocket but failed, prompting them to seek guidance from Claude to identify the cause of the failure.
Among other newly categorized threat actors was a China-based threat actor that used Claude to advance three parallel projects on “an anti-torpedo weapons system.”
Anthropic also identified alleged Russia-based freelance threat actors who sought to build a “full-stack autonomous first-person-view kamikaze drone swarm” and another Russia-based actor who used Claude to research and draft procurement documents for goods likely intended for the Russian government and defense industry customers.
The company said it would continue to strengthen its safeguards and work with partners to prevent misuse of its AI model.
“In each case, we disrupted the activity, used what we learned to strengthen our safeguards, and shared intelligence with authorities and industry partners, where appropriate,” it stated.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
