The New Insider Threat Isn't Human: Securing AI Agents Before They Secure Themselves

In mid-September 2025, engineers inside Anthropic’s threat intelligence team noticed something that didn’t fit the usual pattern of automated probing on their platform. Ten days of digging later, they had a name for it: GTG-1002, a Chinese state-sponsored group that had turned Claude Code into the operational core of a cyber-espionage campaign against roughly thirty organizations — banks, chemical manufacturers, tech firms, government agencies. When Anthropic published its account of the intrusion on November 14, the detail that made security teams sit up wasn’t the target list.