Houthi rebels utilizing AI to make rockets for lethal bomb strikes in Saudi Arabia

US tech giant Anthropic revealed that Yemen-based Houthi rebels used its Claude AI software to help engineer guided rockets and missiles for deadly attacks

Houthi rebels have been using artificial intelligence to help craft warheads for bomb strikes, tech giant Anthropic has admitted. Details revealed by the firm show how the Yemen-based group turned to their popular AI tool, Claude, to assist in building their arsenal.

The revelation comes as the Middle East reels from the group’s most destructive strikes to date. A pair of attacks on King Khalid International Airport left 14 people dead and hundreds more wounded, forcing officials to shut the key transport hub completely.

Vowing a “serious” response, Saudi Arabia’s energy minister warned the Kingdom would not stand by following recent strikes on both airports and vital oil and gas plants.

Behind the scenes, security chiefs in Saudi Arabia have been left stunned by the range and pinpoint accuracy of the Houthis’ hardware.

Now, a report titled ‘Disrupting a Yemen-based guided weapons engineering cell’ exposes the exact role played by cutting-edge software in redrawing the region’s battle lines.

According to Anthropic, the multi-billion-pound firm’s conversational software, normally used for everyday writing and research tasks, was hijacked to condense expert knowledge from world-leading rocket scientists into the hands of a radical engineering cell.

The Houthis used the AI to act as a virtual software engineer, tasking it with tuning control settings, running computer code and adjusting guidance systems after trial warheads missed their marks.

The company’s report states: “Threat actors based in northern Yemen [were] running three weapons development programmes: a guided rocket that used a commodity, phone-class flight computer with final phase homing guidance, a multi-stage ballistic missile with a stated range goal of more than 1,500 miles and a multi-variant missile, referred to as the R2000, that included a hypersonic glide vehicle variant.”

Even after safety team members spotted the breach, the militants kept adapting their methods to keep learning from the system.

“Our safeguards blocked many of their requests, but not all of them. They used a variety of tactics to evade our safeguards and split their work across multiple sessions,” Anthropic said.

“We do not have evidence the actors succeeded in fielding an operational device; but they did test-fire a guided rocket. This field test appears to have failed. Within hours, the actors returned to Claude to work out why it failed.

“We have evidence that the actors had already built an offline simulation toolkit that does not rely on Claude or other engineering computing environments such as MATLAB.”