Anthropic Bans Israeli Account Over Iran, Gulf Social Media Citizen Profiling

Via The Cradle,

An operation run by or on behalf of the Israeli-Singaporean commercial intelligence vendor S2T Unlocking Cyberspace used Claude models to map, classify, and profile social media users across Iran and the Persian Gulf, according to a threat intelligence report published by Anthropic on 11 September.

The platform recorded the locations of users, sorted them as supporters or opponents of their governments, and grouped populations into six demographic categories covering urban, clerical, military, youth, diaspora, and rural.

Its output was written in formal Arabic and styled as official government communications, with sentiment scores broken down by Gulf nationality alongside recommended counternarratives.

The actor fed the model batches of roughly 25 social media posts at a time and directed it to return each poster’s demographic group, location, and political leaning, with confidence ratings attached to every finding.

Anthropic identified a second workstream of more than 255 fabricated social media accounts, which the company said indicated the actor was assembling a stock of fake profiles for later deployment.

In a separate task, the actor directed the model to generate posts for online personas in Persian, Arabic, English, and German, intended to pass as members of both pro- and anti-government Iranian populations.

The company said its findings independently corroborate a February 2023 investigation by the journalism network Forbidden Stories, which documented an S2T surveillance product described in a company brochure recovered from leaked Colombian military files.

Anthropic said the capabilities in that brochure map closely onto the behavior it observed.

Anthropic added that it identified the activity at its pilot stage and found no evidence that later stages of the surveillance chain described by Forbidden Stories were used against real targets before the account was banned.

Israel has invested heavily in cyber capabilities, signals intelligence, artificial intelligence (AI), and advanced surveillance – a technological expansion that shifted the balance of its intelligence collection away from recruited human agents.

Mossad chief Roman Gofman dismissed two of the agency’s most senior officials in August over the failed plot to topple the Iranian government earlier this year.

One had run the intelligence directorate since December while the other headed the Mossad’s Iran division, and both were among the architects of a plan to bring down the Iranian government by igniting nationwide protests and supplying military and communication equipment to opposition groups and insurgents.

Channel 12 said the plan was drawn up in coordination with Washington and was meant to unfold under joint Israeli-US airstrikes.

The New York Times (NYT) reported on 22 March that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had embraced the Mossad’s promise of a popular revolt when he urged US President Donald Trump into the war, and had grown frustrated when no uprising came.

Before the war on Iran, then-Mossad chief David Barnea had told Netanyahu and Trump that once Iran’s leaders were killed, his agency could galvanize the Iranian opposition into renewed mass unrest, swiftly producing regime change.