Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, said it detected and shut down an attempt by a group in Yemen to use its AI system to develop guided rockets and missiles, amid an ongoing offensive by Iran-backed Houthi rebels in the country.
In a threat intelligence report published on September 10 detailing how it identified and blocked several forms of illegal or harmful activity involving Claude, Anthropic said it had identified a cell of threat actors based in northern Yemen running three separate weapons development programmes. These included work on a guided rocket using a low-cost, phone-class flight computer with final-phase homing guidance, a multi-stage ballistic missile with a stated range goal above 2,000 km, and a multi-variant missile programme that included a hypersonic glide vehicle design.
According to the company, the cell used Claude to help develop guidance, navigation and control software for the weapons, work that would otherwise have required a dedicated team of engineers. Anthropic said it had no evidence the group succeeded in fielding an operational weapon, though it confirmed the actors did test-fire a guided rocket. That test reportedly failed, and the group returned to Claude within hours in an attempt to work out what had gone wrong. Anthropic said it banned the accounts involved as soon as the activity was detected, though it did not name the group responsible. Given that the Houthis control much of northern Yemen, including the capital Sanaa, they are widely assumed to be linked to the activity.
The report also detailed other cases Anthropic said it had disrupted between December 2025 and August 2026, including Iranian domestic security units allegedly using Claude to profile citizens by scraping over 155,000 social media posts, a Mali-linked consultant reportedly using the tool to monitor 25 million SIM cards, and a network running around 70 fabricated news websites targeting audiences in the US, Brazil, France and Congo.
The disclosure comes as Houthi forces continue a broader offensive across Yemen, including a push toward the strategically vital Bab al-Mandeb Strait, a key global shipping route connecting Europe and Asia, part of which the group claimed control of around the same time as the report’s release.
