Anthropic recently published one of its most detailed reports to date on attempts to misuse its Claude model, documented through real cases monitored and dismantled over eight months, from December 2025 to August 2026. Running to dozens of pages, the report warrants careful reading from an Arab regional perspective. Our region does not appear in passing; it recurs throughout in multiple forms: as a broad arena of exploitation, as a documented source of serious misuse, and as quiet evidence of genuine technical talent that has found no proper institutional home.
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The most serious documented breach involving our region targeted a government technology agency in a North African country, carried out by an actor believed to be linked to a known Russian intelligence service. That actor compromised the credentials of a virtual private network, used them to seize control of the agency's central server, and extracted a complete database containing more than 300,000 national identity records, alongside commercial registry data for more than half a million companies. This was not a limited leak but a near-total takeover of an entire nation's digital identity infrastructure, executed with algorithmic assistance rather than a large team of human operatives, and in a timeframe that traditional methods could not have achieved.
The report also documented a commercial surveillance company that used artificial intelligence to classify and profile Iranian and Gulf users, as well as diaspora populations demographically linked to them, through fake accounts and automated profiling tools. Separately, Chinese security agencies produced thousands of investigative files within 30 days, including surveillance of dissidents and ethnic minorities, specifically Uyghurs residing in Syria. A distinct Chinese hacking group conducted systematic reconnaissance of government networks across the Middle East as part of a broader espionage campaign.
Taken together, these cases establish one clear fact: ordinary citizens, minorities, and entire government institutions across the region have become documented targets of AI-driven surveillance, profiling, and data acquisition by multinational actors, largely without the victims' knowledge and without any corresponding local capacity to detect or counter such operations in real time.
The more troubling section of the report concerns not what was done to the region, but what was done from within it. The most serious case involves an armed cell in Yemen that integrated flight software into a computer the size of a mobile phone, using cloud computing to perform post-launch analysis on an actual tactical guided missile that had been fired. This was not a theoretical planning exercise or a general information search, but a direct and documented use of artificial intelligence to analyse the results of a real military strike. It may be the first time a major AI company has documented, in such detail, the use of its technology in assessing a field operation launched from within the region.
The report also meticulously documented influence and propaganda operations run by official Iranian institutions, including an entity affiliated with the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance and an operations room described by its own operators as a 'cognitive warfare' centre, said to function from within a seminary in Mashhad, alongside a separate official cultural observatory. These entities collectively used cloud computing to construct ideological frameworks, networks of fake personas, and databases targeting specific individuals, including dissidents and religious minorities. Their activities were explicitly linked to an official Iranian doctrine referred to as 'Jihad al-Tabyan' (Clarification Jihad). Separately, other Iranian units used AI to analyse more than 155,000 tweets and generate open-source intelligence on US Navy deployments.
Beneath the individual cases lies what may be the report's most significant observation. One of its central global conclusions is that artificial intelligence has closed the gap that historically separated well-resourced state operations from those conducted by individuals or small groups with limited means. A single actor, or a small cell, can now accomplish what once required entire specialist teams and substantial budgets.
That conclusion takes on a particular dimension when viewed from within the region, though it demands a careful distinction between two structurally different situations. The Yemeni cell represents genuine technical capability operating entirely outside any formal institutional framework or declared development programme, in a failed-state environment that lacks the structures needed to absorb and direct such skills. The Iranian units represent the opposite arrangement: individuals who have found a formal institutional home, affiliated with the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance and bodies linked to the Revolutionary Guard. Yet that institution has directed their capabilities toward repression, propaganda, and espionage rather than research or legitimate development. Both situations, despite their structural differences, produce the same outcome: real technical expertise, either without an institution to channel it or within an institution that channels it toward destructive ends.
This pattern intersects with the education and employment gap discussed in earlier writing on the region, but it reveals a considerably darker dimension. The limited ability of regional educational, research, and industrial institutions to absorb technical talent and direct it toward productive and lawful purposes does not only mean economic loss or brain drain. In the worst case, it also means that the same skills, aided by widely available and inexpensive AI tools, can be drawn into armed, intelligence, or propaganda projects operating outside any national oversight or accountability.
One dimension of this picture carries a different tone from the warnings that dominate the report. Unlike many earlier technological revolutions, which major powers monopolised for decades before access reached the rest of the world, artificial intelligence today offers a comparatively accessible opportunity for those who know how to use it. The cost of accessing advanced AI tools, measured against the cost of building a traditional research laboratory or advanced manufacturing facility, is historically low. The capital barrier that kept the region behind in previous technological waves is narrower today than at any prior point. The painful irony is that this relatively equal opportunity, which should be directed toward building genuine scientific, industrial, and economic capacity, is the same opportunity that, as the cases in this report show, has found its way toward destructive applications in the absence of institutions capable of guiding it otherwise. The opportunity remains open, but it will not stay neutral indefinitely.
Reading these cases together exposes a paradox that deserves frank acknowledgement. Governments across the region are racing to announce ambitious strategies for adopting artificial intelligence and building the necessary infrastructure. Yet the region is almost entirely absent from the dimension that may matter most at this particular moment: the institutional capacity to monitor the misuse of this technology, whether the region is the target or the source. Everything we know today about being exploited and implicated in these operations comes from a report that an American company published on its own initiative. No local or regional agency specialising in AI-based cyber threats produced it. The region relies entirely on the transparency of foreign model developers even to learn that it was a target or a party to an operation. That dependence is no less dangerous than the breaches themselves, because it means the region lacks even the means to understand the scale of the problem before it can begin to consider a response.
This reality brings the question of digital sovereignty back into focus. It is not enough to develop national AI strategies centred on infrastructure, investment, and skills if there is no national or regional system capable of monitoring misuse of the technology and redirecting the talent capable of misusing it toward legitimate purposes. Such a gap represents not only a technological defence deficit but also the absence of any accountability when entities or individuals from the region are implicated in documented misuse, their actions recorded under our name in a global report read by governments, companies, and research institutions around the world.
The question worth keeping in view after reading this report is twofold: How do we protect ourselves from AI being used against us? And how do we build institutions capable of harnessing genuine technical expertise and directing it toward constructive rather than destructive ends, before that expertise finds itself, as it already has and as this report documents, serving projects that benefit neither the region nor the wider world?
This article was originally written in Arabic by Nadim Hatem Mansour for Al Ghad.
