Suspected Chinese spies spoofed an Anthropic exec, ex-White House official in AI phishing

A suspected Chinese espionage group impersonated AI policy figures, including a senior Anthropic employee and a former White House official, in phishing campaigns targeting AI policy experts at US universities, think tanks, and law firms, security researchers say. The bulk of these campaigns occurred in July, according to Proofpoint, which discovered the espionage attempts and attributed them to a China-aligned group it tracks as TA419. Proofpoint’s security alert comes a day after OpenAI accused China’s Moonshot AI of stealing the American models’ reasoning and other data in distillation attacks that began on July 1. “In July 2026, TA419 impersonated multiple individuals, including a former member of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy leadership team, in credential phishing campaigns targeting AI policy experts in the US,” Proofpoint threat-intelligence analyst Mark Kelly said in a Thursday report. …