Anthropic says Claude was misused to run an industrial-scale AI catfishing network across ~28 dating apps
Anthropic security researchers traced unusually high Claude API activity to a network of around 28 dating apps where autonomous AI personas handled most conversations and gig workers were used for occasional liveness checks; the company published findings in its "Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026" report after revealing the abuse at Sleuthcon. The scheme monetized interactions via in-app coins, involved multiple AI models (Claude plus a small non-Anthropic reply model and an image-editing model), and left many apps live on major US app stores while thousands of users were catfished.