Financial Times: Northern Yemen Cell Used Claude to Develop Ballistic and Guided Missiles
Euro Times – London
A cell of actors in northern Yemen sought to use Anthropic’s Claude artificial intelligence model to develop guidance, navigation and control software for advanced weapons, including ballistic and guided missiles, according to a report by the Financial Times, based on a security report by the US company.
Anthropic did not explicitly identify the Houthis, but said it had detected a “threat actor cell based in northern Yemen”, an area largely controlled by the Houthis. The cell was operating three weapons-development programs.
Three weapons programs
According to Anthropic, the projects included a multi-stage ballistic missile, a missile with multiple variants, and a guided missile using a flight computer built from commercially available hardware with capabilities comparable to a smartphone.
The company said the users relied on Claude Code in place of human software engineers to develop guidance, navigation and control software designed to steer the vehicle and maintain its stability in flight.
They used Claude to integrate an open-source autopilot system into the flight computer, write control and position-estimation software, tune control parameters, build firmware and run flight simulations.
Safeguards blocked some requests — but not all
Anthropic said its safety systems stopped many of the cell’s requests, but not all of them. The actors used several methods to work around the restrictions, including concealing their objectives and the true purpose of the software, and splitting tasks across multiple sessions so that no single session revealed the full scope of the project.
A failed test launch
The company said it had no evidence that the cell succeeded in deploying a complete operational system. But it did identify an important practical step: a test launch of a guided missile.
The test appears to have failed, as the users returned to Claude within hours to investigate the causes of the failure and work on possible fixes.
More significantly, Anthropic said it had evidence that the cell had already created an offline simulation environment that no longer depended on Claude or other engineering computing environments. That suggests some of the knowledge and tools developed while using the model had become usable independently.
The Houthi and Bab al-Mandab context
The Financial Times noted that the Houthis are among the strongest components of the network of groups aligned with Iran, and that they have developed their missile capabilities over years while receiving weapons and technology from Iran, according to analysts.
The disclosure comes as the Houthis advance along Yemen’s western coast toward Bab al-Mandab and intensify attacks on Saudi energy infrastructure, adding a new dimension to the risks associated with the evolution of their technical capabilities.
Anthropic said it banned the accounts linked to the activity and shared threat information with partners in the public and private sectors to reduce future risks.
