When AI Becomes an Attacker: What the Claude Cyberattack Teaches Us About Identity, Governance, and the Future of Security

The cybersecurity landscape is changing faster than most organizations can adapt, and this year we witnessed a new milestone: a cyberattack campaign that weaponized Anthropic’s Claude large language model to aid in targeted exploitation. While the AI itself wasn’t breached, threat actors leveraged publicly accessible AI interfaces to generate convincing phishing content, automate research, and significantly reduce the barrier to launching complex attacks.

This incident represents a turning point.
For the first time at scale, AI wasn’t the target, AI was the tool.
And it raised a critical question: If AI systems can act, decide, and produce human-grade output… shouldn’t we treat them like identities?

At Cortrucent Security, the answer is unequivocally yes.

AI, Agents, and Identity: The Security Blind Spot

Organizations have spent decades maturing identity governance for humans and service accounts. But the rise of AI agents, autonomous or semi-autonomous systems capable of executing tasks, adds a third type of workforce identity.

Consider what modern AI systems can do:

• Access third-party tools and APIs

• Summarize or extract sensitive information

• Execute multi-step workflows

• Integrate with ticketing and operational systems

• Communicate with customers and employees

• Make decisions based on organizational data

This is identity behavior, plain and simple.

Yet most organizations:

❌ Do not track AI usage as identity activity
❌ Do not maintain permissions or entitlements for AI systems
❌ Do not log AI-initiated actions with proper attribution
❌ Do not govern what data AI systems should or should not access
❌ Do not maintain an AI acceptable-use or safety policy

In the Claude-assisted cyberattack, threat actors exploited this gap. They created “shadow AI agents,” spinning up AI sessions as unmonitored worker identities to generate malicious content and automate reconnaissance.

If organizations don’t move quickly, these gaps will only widen.

AI Systems Must Now Be Treated as IdentitiesWhy Continuous Awareness Matters

AI systems—whether Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or internal LLMs have the ability to:

• Access systems

• Manipulate data

• Trigger workflows

• Influence decisions

That means they must be subject to identity governance just like human and machine accounts.

AI Identity Governance Should Include:

1. Identity Classification
Assign each AI system a unique identity type (AI Worker, AI Agent, AI Integration).

2. Access Controls & Least Privilege
AI should receive only the data and API permissions needed for its approved purpose, nothing more.

3. Activity Logging & Monitoring
All AI-initiated actions must be traceable, auditable, and attributable.

4. Prompt & Output Governance
Create guardrails around acceptable prompts, data sources, and outputs.

5. Lifecycle Management
Track AI usage from onboarding to decommissioning, just like any employee or service account.

6. Continuous Risk Assessment
Monitor AI systems for drift, misuse, model hallucination, or unexpected behaviors.

If organizations don’t implement these controls, AI becomes an ungoverned insider, one that never sleeps, never asks for PTO, and can make mistakes at scale.

Lessons From the Claude Attack

The attackers used the model to:

• Generate tailored phishing campaigns

• Draft malicious scripts without explicitly requesting harmful content

• Analyze OSINT data to identify exploitable entry points

• Iterate quickly and at volume

The lesson is not that Claude is unsafe.
The lesson is AI gives attackers leverage, and we must assume threat actors will incorporate AI into every stage of the cyber kill chain.

AI doesn’t replace attackers, it multiplies them.

How Businesses Can Reduce AI-Related Cyber Risk Today

Cortrucent Security recommends the following actionable steps:

1. Establish an AI Acceptable Use Policy (AUP)

Define what systems employees may use, what data is allowed, and which tasks require approved AI.

2. Begin Treating AI Systems as Identities

Include them in your IAM / IGA program.

3. Implement Governance for AI Agents

Any semi-autonomous agent needs logging, review, and permission scoping.

4. Restrict Sensitive Data Exposure

No AI system should ingest regulated, confidential, or proprietary information without governance approval.

5. Train Users on AI-Generated Social Engineering

Employees must learn to spot hyper-personalized phishing that AI now makes trivial.

6. Validate AI Output

Critical decisions should never rely solely on AI without human verification.

7. Conduct AI Security Assessments

Evaluate your organization’s attack surface created by internal and external AI tools.

8. Deploy Monitoring for AI-Related Threat Activity

Look for unusual volume, automation patterns, or outbound requests typical of AI-generated activity.

AI Will Be the Next Identity Frontier

The future workforce will be a blend of:

• Human employees

• Machine identities

• AI-driven agents

AI is not “just a tool.”
It is an operational actor, and operational actors require governance.

Organizations that fail to recognize this will face a surge of AI-accelerated breaches, not because AI is dangerous, but because unmanaged identities always become attack vectors.

At Cortrucent Security, we believe the companies that build AI identity governance today will be the ones that survive the threat landscape of tomorrow.

Stay vigilant. Stay secure.