Anthropic Cuts Iran’s Claude Accounts
Anthropic has shut 16 Claude accounts it says were used by Iranian security units to watch thousands of people, and by an exiled opposition network to impersonate an activist and map supporters inside Iran.
The company set the findings out in a threat report published on Thursday, covering abuse it says it stopped between December 2025 and August 2026. Two clusters of accounts, it assessed, belonged to paramilitary and domestic-security bodies. A third line of activity was tied to the People’s Mojahedin and the National Council of Resistance of Iran.
One of the state-linked groups described itself as a seven-department outfit with offices in the provinces. It claimed to have built files on 6,388 Iranians in a year and to hold identity records on citizens. Anthropic said Claude was used to help design the public face of what looked like an official case-management system and to work through 155,216 tweets. A second cell, based in Qom, used the model as a coding assistant. Among the products was a Firefox add-on, “al-Najm al-thāqib,” dressed up as a prayer-times tool and built to lift identities off social platforms.
Both cells poured material into a hub called Arman. A person’s file could hold a national identity number, stated beliefs, a criminal record, social-media handles and a field labelled “action.” Anthropic said it was highly confident the operators answered to Iranian paramilitary security services and that some work followed tasking from senior officials.
The same toolkit included a way to unmask messenger users, a link from phone numbers to names, a fake national-ID page, a bot that mass-reported Telegram accounts, and the prayer-times harvester. One pipeline flagged 39 opposition and diaspora accounts. Another user, working beside one of the units, asked Claude to copy the voices of three Iranian writers and to stockpile succession messaging for when the supreme leader dies.
The MEK-linked operation ran on a different logic: not files for the state, but a false person in the opposition. Operators cloned a real activist’s Telegram account, fed Claude about 8,400 of his posts and then used the model to talk, live, with people who thought they were still dealing with him. Anthropic said at least four of those running the work were on official NCRI media staff.
The same network scraped more than 500 channels, sorted people inside Iran by city, age, job, politics and whether they had been arrested, and mined 51,944 stored messages for psychological sketches of dozens of targets. Synthetic faces with Persian audio sold Maryam Rajavi’s ten-point plan as if ordinary Iranians were speaking. Early posts kept the Mojahedin name off the copy so the feed would look independent. Monarchists and the Pahlavi camp were attacked too, including with a fake video and the line “Neither Shah Nor Sheikh.” The work sat on a shared Claude agent stack Anthropic called Viktor.
The report also records Iran-linked propaganda, attempts to follow U.S. ships, more watching of Iranians, and collection on Israelis and the Jewish diaspora. Anthropic says it told governments and other firms.
