Anthropic reported just a few days ago that its Claude AI chatbot was misused by a Chinese state sponsored hacker group to conduct a large autonomous cyber espionage campaign. The company said that attackers used Claude’s agentic AI capabilities to infiltrate around thirty global targets, which include large tech companies, financial institutions, chemical manufacturing companies, and government agencies.

The AI startup’s claims that this was the first ever large scale cyberattack executed by an AI sent shockwaves around the tech world, leading to a round of panic about the use of the new technology.

However, Meta AI Chief Scientist Yann Lecun has dubbed the new study by Anthropic as ‘dubious’ and aimed at scaring people to gain ‘regulatory capture’.

In response to a post quoting the Anthropic study and advocating for government regulation on AI being made a national priority, Lecun wrote, “You’re being played by people who want regulatory capture. They are scaring everyone with dubious studies so that open source models are regulated out of existence.”

Apart from being the Chief AI Scientist at Meta, Lecun is among the most respected faces in the field of AI and also won the acclaimed Turing Award in 2018. He is also widely recognised as one of the “Godfathers of Deep Learning” along with Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton.

Notably, this is not the first time that Lecun has attacked Anthropic. A few months ago, he went on to call Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei an ‘AI doomer’ and called him “intellectually dishonest and/or morally corrupt”.

Anthropic had said in its blogpost that it first detected suspicious activity in September 2025 that turned out to be a highly sophisticated espionage campaign.

It stated that the hackers were able to use AI to perform 80-90% of the campaign and human intervention was required only sporadically.

“At the peak of its attack, the AI made thousands of requests, often multiple per second — an attack speed that would have been, for human hackers, simply impossible to match,” the company said.

The company, however, also noted that Claude didn’t always work perfectly and occasionally hallucinated credentials or claimed to have extracted secret information which was publicly available.

“This remains an obstacle to fully autonomous cyberattacks,” it added.

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Lin Jian had also reacted to the accusation by Anthropic in a press briefing, calling it “groundless accusations that have no evidence”.