Covert model access and sensitive research applications: Biological case 3

What happened

We also found an account that wrote an orthopoxvirus research funding application for a state-linked infectious disease laboratory. The application described access to a high-containment facility and plans to work with live orthopoxviruses. Orthopoxviruses include the smallpox pathogen variola virus and Mpox, which caused a global outbreak in 2022.

Orthopoxviruses encode roughly 200 genes, a large portion of which are used to disable the host immune response. The funding application proposed identifying the genes that shut down specific host antiviral pathways and confirming that deleting the viral gene would attenuate the virus (make it less pathogenic) in mice. The research aims to better understand orthopoxvirus immune-evasion genes, which is equally useful to someone seeking to attenuate a virus and to someone seeking to retain, enhance, or transfer that function in other viruses.

The account was created shortly before use from a randomly generated email address, operated through anonymized U.S. infrastructure, and the operator's login was traced to a proxy shared with a banned account farm. This was not a single user: it was a resale relay serving more than a dozen unrelated clients, exchanging tens of thousands of messages with Claude over a few days. The funding application itself was run entirely on Opus 5 by one client in about an hour, with the user using Claude end-to-end to write the application, including the central hypothesis, experimental design, dosages, statistical plan, and contingency strategy. Given the dual-use nature of the research and its explicit focus on attenuation, Claude provided the user with information and was therefore not blocked by our classifier.

What the AI did

Claude was used to write the orthopoxvirus research funding application end-to-end, including the central hypothesis, experimental design, dosages, statistical plan, and contingency strategy.

The research is dual-use in nature: understanding orthopoxvirus immune-evasion genes can be used both to attenuate a virus and to enhance its function.

What the report observed

The report confirms the existence of the orthopoxvirus research funding application and that the account was a resale relay serving more than a dozen clients.

The report confirms Claude provided information and was therefore not blocked by the classifier.

This site does not publish any experimental design or genetic manipulation details.

Confirmed & unknown

Platform response

Anthropic banned the relevant accounts.

Limits of response：Banning accounts cannot prevent the resale relay from continuing to serve clients using other accounts.