Financial Times: Yemenis Used Anthropic’s Claude AI to Develop Missiles

The Financial Times has reported that a weapons group based in northern Yemen, likely linked to Yemen’s Houthis, used Anthropic’s Claude artificial intelligence to advance parts of its missile and rocket guidance and control programme.

According to the report, the group was working on three weapons programmes: a guided rocket with a flight computer at the hardware level of a mobile phone, a multistage ballistic missile with a target range of more than 2,000 kilometres, and a series of missiles known as the R2000, one variant of which was said by the report to have been capable of supersonic flight.

According to Anthropic, members of the group used the Claude Code tool as a substitute for part of the work of software engineers. The report said the tool was used to write guidance, navigation and control software, connect autopilot systems to flight computers, adjust control parameters, simulate flight and review test results.

Anthropic also said the individuals used several versions of Claude at the same time, assigning separate tasks to each one, so that one model was responsible for coding, another for research and a third for code review.

The company said its security systems had blocked a number of requests related to weapons development, but the group was able to bypass some of these restrictions by concealing the true nature of the project and splitting the work across several sessions.

The report added that the group eventually tested a guided rocket in Yemen, but the test apparently failed. According to Anthropic, members of the group returned to Claude a few hours later to examine the cause of the failure and fix the software.

However, Anthropic said it had no evidence that the group had managed to produce an operational weapons system. The company added that before the accounts were blocked, the group had built a set of offline simulation tools that did not depend on Claude or similar software to continue working.

Anthropic is one of the companies active in the development of artificial intelligence, and Claude is one of its main products, a tool used to generate text and assist with programming.