A major tech company has revealed that militants in Yemen used its popular AI bot Claude to help develop warheads and ballistic missiles.

Deadly strikes on King Khalid International Airport by the Houthi group over the weekend hit a passenger terminal, killing more than a dozen people and wounding hundreds.

The strike on Saturday was the deadliest in a Gulf Arab nation since the Iran war began.

Last month, Anthropic – the company behind the bot – published a report admitting that the Houthis had launched three weapons programmes using Claude AI amid growing fears artificial intelligence could bring about human extinction.

The technology provided homing guidance, allowing the missiles to reroute themselves if they missed targets.

Anthropic added: ‘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.’

The Houthis used Claude Code to help develop technology used to guide, control, and navigate the weapons.

Anthropic was able to block most of the AI requests, but not all of them.

While it is unclear whether the missiles developed using the technology, it comes amid warnings by tech bosses that AI could threaten human civilisation – and even wipe us out one day.

‘They used a variety of tactics to evade our safeguards and split their work across multiple sessions,’ Anthropic explained.

‘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.’

The potential threat AI poses to humanity has made headlines since Anthropic safety researcher Jacob Coxon publicly stepped down from his role over fears the tech could bring about human extinction.

His ex-colleague and Anthropic’s alignment science lead, Evan Hubinger, shared his fears.

‘We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade,’ he said.

Since then, tech bosses and politicians have been lobbying for tighter controls on the development and use of the rapidly developing technology.

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