Suspected Chinese hackers impersonated an Anthropic employee and ex-US officials in an espionage campaign aimed at gaining insights into American AI developments, a US cybersecurity firm said Thursday.
The hackers targeted the email accounts of experts in AI export controls and the military applications of AI, among other topics, who work at US universities, think tanks and law firms, according to Silicon Valley-based Proofpoint, which discovered the activity.
Access to those experts’ digital lives could offer Beijing critical insights into how US society is grappling with what many see as an existential issue in AI governance.
Proofpoint did not find evidence of successful breaches of the targeted organizations, but the firm may have only uncovered some of the activity, and Beijing-linked groups are known to keep trying on a target until they get in.
“We are confident that [the hacking group] is a Chinese government-aligned threat actor based on targeting consistently in line with Chinese government interests, observed infrastructure and technical artifacts, and corroboration from industry partners,” Proofpoint staff researcher Mark Kelly told CNN in an email.
CNN has requested comment from the Chinese Embassy in Washington, DC. Beijing regularly denies US hacking allegations.
News of the hacking attempts, which occurred in February and July, comes as AI continues to be a crucial focal point in US-China relations.
President Donald Trump discussed AI last week at the White House with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, but the meeting did not produce a substantive accord on the technology. Trump has resisted calls for guardrails on advanced AI models out of concern that the US will fall behind China in the race for AI supremacy.
Last month, the Trump administration accused Chinese AI firms of committing “industrial-scale” theft of their American counterparts’ trade secrets to save money and bring the coveted technology to market faster. China denied the allegations.
US allies have also warned about China’s access to AI know-how. Britain’s MI5 intelligence service said Wednesday that British academics have contributed research on AI and cybersecurity to a Chinese institute with close ties to Chinese intelligence. In some cases, the academics may not have been aware of the connection between the institute and Chinese intelligence, the advisory said.
In the activity Proofpoint uncovered, the suspected Chinese operatives impersonated Lynne Parker, who served as a senior tech official in the White House under Trump and President Joe Biden. The hackers sent an email posing as Parker to someone at a US law firm inviting them to participate in an “AI policy advisory committee.” The fake Parker followed up with a malware-laced document purporting to offer more information on the fake committee.
The real Parker told CNN that colleagues started reaching out to her when they received suspicious emails from people claiming to be her.
“My first concern was for the colleagues who might receive the impersonated email,” said Parker, who is now associate vice chancellor emerita at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. “I wanted to warn them but realized that’s very difficult to do when I don’t know who is being targeted.”
“On a personal level, I felt sadness that relationships I’ve built over my career were being exploited by bad actors to deceive others,” Parker said in an email.
The suspected Chinese operatives also, according to Proofpoint, chose to impersonate a senior employee at Anthropic, the American AI firm that has clashed with the Trump administration over guardrails on the technology.
The hackers sent an email on February 26 in the name of the Anthropic employee to an AI policy analyst at a US think tank. The subject line read, “Request for Feedback on Military Integration of Claude,” a reference to one of Anthropic’s AI models. Through the email exchange, the hackers tried to steal the think tanker’s email credentials, according to Proofpoint.
The day after the email, the Trump administration ordered federal agencies and contractors that work with the military to cease business with Anthropic after the firm refused to allow the Pentagon to use its artificial-intelligence technology without restrictions.
Chinese cyber operatives, according to experts who track them, are targeting just about every level of the AI ecosystem, from the semiconductors that power the technology to the people who dedicate their careers to it. US competitiveness in AI may hinge on how well it can protect that ecosystem from infiltration, according to experts.
“Getting AI policy right is essential to our national security and economic competitiveness,” said Parker, the former US tech official who was impersonated. “That includes protecting the people and institutions whose expertise helps inform those decisions.”
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