Blog Post

The headlines all told the same story:
“Hackers used an AI model to conduct cyberattacks.”

But buried inside the reporting was a far more important detail — and one that didn’t get nearly enough attention:

Defenders used AI more effectively than the attackers did.

Anthropic’s Threat Intelligence team didn’t just block the malicious accounts.
They used their own AI systems to uncover, trace, model, and dismantlethe operation.

This is the real story — not AI-assisted hacking, but AI-assisted incident response.

AI gave attackers scale — but it gave defenders visibility.

According to the CBS report, the attackers used Claude to automate reconnaissance and password harvesting across approximately 30 organizations. The AI allowed them to issue “thousands of requests per second,” something no human team could sustain.

But the full 38-page Anthropic report reveals the deeper truth:
AI allowed defenders to trace the entire operation end-to-end.

By feeding logs and telemetry into their internal AI analysis workflows, Anthropic’s team could:

• reconstruct      attacker intent
• identify      coordinated activity across systems
• detect      anomalies that didn’t fit normal user patterns
• analyze      massive datasets in real time

This is something no human-only SOC could have accomplished as quickly.

The defenders’ advantage: AI can process evidence faster than attackers can hide it.

What makes cyber defense so hard isn’t that attackers are brilliant — it’s that defenders must sift through mountains of noise to find a tiny signal.

AI changes that dynamic.

Instead of manually combing logs, AI can surface patterns in seconds.
Instead of correlating credentials by hand, AI can map relationships instantly.
Instead of reviewing code artifacts and behavior patterns manually, AI can evaluate them continuously.

In this case, attackers used AI to accelerate their workflow.
Defenders used AI to illuminate it.

And illumination wins.

Why this matters for small businesses and MSPs

For years, cyber defense has required:

• expensive      tools
• specialized      staff
• round-the-clock      monitoring

AI narrows that gap.

Soon, AI-first defensive systems will offer:

• autonomous      log correlation
• real-time      anomaly detection
• automatic      vulnerability assessment
• instant      post-incident reporting

That means small organizations can finally access capabilities that were once limited to Fortune 500 SOC teams.

AI is not the great equalizer —
AI security is.

The real lesson: AI is essential for defense.

Anthropic’s report shows where cyber defense is heading:

• Faster.
• Clearer.
• More      automated.
• More      accessible.

We’re moving into a world where cyberattacks evolve at machine speed — and only machine-speed defense can keep up.

Attackers using AI was inevitable.
Defenders using it better is the part that should give everyone confidence.