New Delhi, Sept. 12 -- Artificial intelligence (AI) is lowering the barriers to sophisticated cyberattacks by allowing individual hackers to automate operations ranging from reconnaissance and phishing to system exploitation and data theft, according to a report by Anthropic.

"Sophisticated attacks no longer require sophisticated attackers," Anthropic said in the report titled Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026, adding AI use has moved beyond simple chatbot interactions to multi-agent systems capable of carrying out reconnaissance, exploitation and data exfiltration.

The report said Anthropic identified hacktivists, financially motivated criminals and state-linked espionage operators using Claude to run multi-victim c...