Anthropic said it stopped multiple attempts by scientists this year to use its technology for research that could help develop biological weapons, as experts increasingly fear the threat that AI poses to public safety. The start-up gave five examples of times actors “circumvented controls” and made other efforts to “obfuscate” the purpose of their research to dodge safeguards. The cases involved some users in nations that it prohibits from accessing its models, which include Russia, China and Iran.

Anthropic said it had banned the accounts mentioned in the report, but it did not disclose the names of the research institutions or the nations where the incidents took place. The case studies included a researcher from an “unsupported region” who “spent weeks planning” experiments involving avian influenza with Claude, Anthropic’s AI model. The company said its safety filters restricted the work to its weakest models.

It emphasised it could not be sure that the scientists in its examples intended to cause harm. The same information needed to create biological weapons could also be used to develop a vaccine. A maelstrom over AI safety kicked off earlier this week when Jacob Coxon resigned from the company, saying employees “earnestly believe it [AI] could kill us all by the end of the decade”.

Concerns over the technology began to escalate earlier this year with the release of advanced models such as Anthropic’s Mythos. Open AI also caused alarm in July when it said its models had autonomously hacked into AI group Hugging Face.