A weapons cell linked to the Houthis used Claude AI to develop missile guidance software according
By Bernard Moerdler,
A weapons cell linked to the Houthis used Claude AI to develop missile guidance software according to Anthropic's September threat report.
Anthropic said the cell used Claude Code to develop guidance, navigation and control software to steer and stabilize rockets and missiles. This included adapting an open-source autopilot to a phone-class flight computer, writing control software and running flight simulations.
The company identified three projects: a guided rocket with final-stage homing guidance, a multistage ballistic missile with a target range above 2,000 kilometers, and an R2000 missile family that included a hypersonic glide vehicle variant. Operators ran several Claude sessions simultaneously, assigning them separate coding, research and code-review tasks normally handled by human engineers.
Anthropic said its safeguards blocked many requests, but users concealed their intentions and divided work across conversations to evade detection. The group conducted a guided rocket test that appeared to fail, then returned to Claude within hours to investigate what went wrong.
The company said it found no evidence that the group successfully deployed an operational weapon. It banned the accounts and shared information with partners, but said the operators had already built an offline simulation toolkit that could run without Claude.
Topics: Missile Defense & Alerts
Reported by Bernard Moerdler for Bernie News Network. See our editorial standards and corrections policy.