WSJ What’s News - China-Backed Hackers Use Anthropic AI to Automate Cyberattacks

Episode Date: November 13, 2025

P.M. Edition for Nov. 13. AI startup Anthropic said China’s state-sponsored hackers used its tools to automate cyberattacks against corporations and governments. WSJ’s Sam Schechner reports on the inflection point for hackers’ use of AI. Disney’s shares fell after a quarterly earnings report that fell short of Wall Street’s expectations. And California is eyeing a first-of-its-kind tax on billionaires. WSJ’s Paul Kiernan unpacks the ballot initiative for a wealth tax that’s already run into steep opposition. Sabrina Siddiqui hosts. Sign up for the WSJ's free What's News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Way better. Save on insurance by switching to Bel Air Direct and use the money to fix your car. Bell Air Direct, insurance simplified. Conditions apply. In California, there's a push for an unprecedented wealth tax on billionaires. Plus, an inflection point in hackers using AI to automate dozens of attacks on governments and corporations. It's an arms race, really, between AI companies and people who would misuse them. And, Verizon plans to cut roughly 15,000 jobs in its largest reduction ever.

It's Thursday, November 13th. I'm Sabrina Siddiqui for the Wall Street Journal, sitting in for Alex Oslo. This is the PM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today. We exclusively report that Verizon is planning to cut roughly 15,000 jobs in its largest reduction ever. That's according to people familiar with the matter. The cuts are likely going to happen next week, and most of them will be layoffs. The company also plans to turn about 200 stores into franchises, moving employees off its payroll. Verizon is the largest U.S. telecom company when you're going by subscribers,

but it's struggling to hold on to customers in both the wireless and home internet markets. Last month, the company named a new CEO, Dan Shulman, who was the former chief executive of PayPal and Virgin Mobile USA. He has said he would aggressively reduce the company's cost base and take steps to reverse the customer losses. In other tech and media news, Disney stock fell more than 7% today after lackluster quarterly results that fell short of Wall Street expectations. Revenue was basically flat and a key operating profit measure dropped 5%. The company's parks and streaming businesses posted profit gains, but investors remain worried about Disney's ability to manage the transition from traditional TV to streaming and to execute on the multi-billion dollar investments it is making in theme parks and cruise ships.

We're exclusively reporting that Anthropic, one of the world's largest AI startups, said today that state-sponsored hackers from China use the company's tools for dozens of cyberattacks on governments and major corporations. Anthropics says the September hacking campaign involved an unprecedented level of automation with a company officials saying 80 to 90% of the attack was automated. Sam Shackner, a tech reporter at the Wall Street Journal, joins us now to discuss.

Sam, is this a turning point in hackers' use of AI in their attacks? Yeah, it really does seem to be something of an inflection point. We've seen hackers do more and more individual tasks using AI. It helps them write fishing emails. It helps them scan for vulnerabilities. What Anthropic is reporting here is that they saw AI orchestrating an attack over all of these different steps with humans only getting involved in a few individual choke points. And so the company itself says that this is an inflection point. And what do we know about the hackers, the targets, and what information they were able to get? We don't know.

that much. Anthropic did not disclose who the targets were. It said that there were roughly 30 targets that it detected, including tech corporations, financial services, a chemical company, as well as foreign governments. They wouldn't say whether the U.S. was a target, but they did confirm that the U.S. was not one of the handful of three or four instances where the hackers did manage to get into their target systems. Hackers were able to go around safeguards in Anthropics AI tools known as Claude. How did they do that? The company says that the hackers posed as security contractors for the targets

and said that they were conducting what's called penetration testing, trying to get into those targets and find vulnerabilities, which is a legitimate use of AI. And so that was how the hackers were able to sidestep some of Anthropics protections. Is that an unusual approach to pose as testers? No, in fact, that's a pretty standard approach to what's known as jailbreaking and AI system. In this case, not only did they pose as security researchers, but they also cut the tasks into much smaller bits,

so that each bit didn't necessarily seem that illicit. And then they were stitched together in such a way that Claude still did most of the activity, but it didn't necessarily, each instance of it didn't understand that it was part of a broader hacking campaign. What has the company done in response in updating methods to circumvent hackers? Anthropic said that it has new methods of detecting hackers. And so they've updated the methods that are kind of outside of Claude that you would use to detect this kind of misuse. It's an arms race, really, between AI companies and people who would misuse them.

In general, the private AI companies who keep a tighter hold of their systems like Anthropic or like Open AI, are somewhat less exposed to this kind of misuse. Hackers were using the latest technology to hack long before AI, and they're going to continue to do that. And the question is, you know, who comes out ahead? That was the Wall Street Journal's Sam Schaeckner. Thank you, Sam. Of course. Thanks so much for having me.

There was a broad market decline on Wall Street today with worries that the Federal Reserve could decide not to cut interest rates next month weighing on stocks. The NASDAQ lead declines, dropping 2.3% as chip stocks, including Nvidia, AI infrastructure company Correve, Tesla, and other technology companies took a dive. The Dow was off nearly 800 points, or 1.7%, and the SNP also fell 1.7%. Coming up, how it pushed for a first-of-its-kind tax on billionaires is playing out in California. That's after the break. You know what's better than the one big thing?

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and so is the price tag. In the last several months, we've seen price increases from HBO Max, Disney Plus, Peacock, and Apple TV. Paramount Plus is raising prices early next year. The Journal's Deputy Media Bureau Chief Melissa Corn reports on the newest wave of streamflation. We seem to be stubbornly committed to our streaming subscriptions these days, And even though the prices have risen, in some cases quite significantly over the past few years, research shows that people are still subscribing to multiple plans. Streaming is kind of running our lives right now. There's all these different tiers of service now for a lot of the different streaming platforms.

But essentially, the two main versions are ad-free and ad-supported. And there's been a shift more toward the ad-supported. So you pay a little less, but you do have to watch commercials. Melissa says people aren't significantly changing their streaming habits, even as prices go up. We haven't seen this price fatigue yet, but when people do kind of an audit of their subscriptions, they're sometimes shocked to see how many things they subscribe to. So occasionally we'll see some push toward that and people trimming down. But at the same time, people want to be able to talk about whatever the hot show is that their friends are watching.

So they don't really want to walk away from all of it. So you may see more of a push toward the bundled plans, more of a push toward the ad-supported plans, and more and more we've already started to see this and reported on it, pausing, right? So you pause your subscription for three months, and then you rejoin it when the new season of the show you want comes back. So you're kind of dipping in and out of these subscriptions more actively versus just holding them long term. You can hear more from Melissa on tomorrow's episode of 10. tech news briefing. And even if it's the age of streaming, NBCUniversal is going old school and launching a new cable channel. NBCSN will launch on Monday and mostly carry sports that are also streamed on the company's peacock service, including NBA games, Big Ten College football, golf,

and Premier League soccer. Google's YouTube TV, one of the country's largest pay TV providers with roughly 10 million subscribers, has agreed to carry the channel. Comcasts, NBCU's parent company, will also carry it on its Xfinity cable platform, and NBCU said it expects to sign more deals by the end of the year. The Justice Department is suing California to block its new congressional map for the 26 midterm elections. The lawsuit intensifies a political and legal fight that could determine control of the House of Representatives. The federal government argues that California's new electoral lines adding five Democratic-leaning districts are an illegal racial gerrymandering.

The state hasn't yet responded to the litigation, but California Democrats have described their efforts as a legal response to a Texas map. That map, approved this summer, adds as many as five Republican-leaning districts and is also the subject of litigation. And in California, there's a new approach to taxing the rich. A ballot initiative proposed by a health care workers' union would take aim at the state's billionaires with a one-time 5% tax on net worth over $1 billion. If this went into effect, it would be an unprecedented effort to tax wealth rather than income.

That means instead of taxing, for example, salary, the state would be taxing assets, a person's stock portfolio, art collection, cars, and even intellectual property rights. WSJ economics reporter Paul Kiernan says the measure is being sponsored by a health care workers' union. The union is being pretty disciplined about saying this is, only aiming to raise tax revenue to offset health care cuts. But everyone around this proposal, everyone who is advising it, everyone who's supporting it, when you talk to them, they couch it much more in terms of like tax the rich. A lot of the people who are supporting this proposal are people who have been saying for a long time that the richest Americans have basically gotten too

wealthy and too powerful. And the only way to take them down a peg is by taxing their assets. You can't really get there by taxing their income. budget is no sure thing. Supporters need to gather 875,000 signatures and then win approval from California voters next November. It's already encountered significant opposition. Governor Gavin Newsom has said he is against the measure. He's against wealth taxes. And also this week, a group of political strategists with ties to Newsom launched a political action committee called Stop the Squeeze to oppose the campaign. When you talk to people who oppose this idea. They're very concerned that it could open up the floodgates. You know, critics of this

measure say that it's not outlandish. In fact, it's to be expected that if it succeeds, you could get a whole slew of other interest groups trying to tax billionaires to raise money for their initiatives. Paul also says it would be hard for California to figure out the logistics of a tax on assets. It would impose a pretty substantial burden on the state revenue authorities. One reason for that is that California is home to a lot of tech startups. Shares of private companies are hard to value. They're the liquid. Another thing that's going to make it difficult is nobody really knows exactly how many billionaires there are.

It's much harder to get conclusive data on billionaires who own shares in private companies, intellectual property rights, who own a lot of art and collectibles. The state, if this passes, is going to have its work cut out for it. just figuring out who to go after. And that's what's news for this Thursday afternoon. Today's show was produced by Pierre Biennames and Zoe Culkin with supervising producer Tali Arbel. I'm Sabrina Siddiqui for the Wall Street Journal. We'll be back with the new show tomorrow morning.

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