The potential abuse of consumer AI tools is raising concerns, with budding cybercriminals apparently able to trick coding chatbots into giving them a leg-up in producing malicious programmes.

So-called “vibe hacking” — a twist on the more positive “vibe coding” that generative AI tools supposedly enable those without extensive expertise to achieve — marks “a concerning evolution in AI-assisted cybercrime” according to American company Anthropic.

The lab — whose Claude product competes with the biggest-name chatbot, ChatGPT from OpenAI — highlighted in a report published Wednesday the case of “a cybercriminal (who) used Claude Code to conduct a scaled data extortion operation across multiple international targets in a short timeframe”.

Anthropic said the programming chatbot was exploited

See Full Page