At the beginning of this month, Anthropic, the parent company of the artificial intelligence (AI) agent "Claude" used by the Chinese Communist Party, released a report on how the company "identified and disrupted operations in which threat actors tried to use Claude for malicious activity."
Foreign policy and AI expert Bob Maginnis is not surprised that page 89 of the report talks about "disrupting a China-based religious affairs intelligence operation targeting Catholic, Tibetan Buddhist, Falun Gong, and Taiwanese Christian communities."
"The Chinese surveil anyone that is considered a resistor to their communist agenda, whether it's at home or abroad," he tells AFN.
He points out that China had assets spying on the U.S. even before the advent of AI.
"They have 300,000 students that they send to the United States," Maginnis relays. "They leverage them for intelligence, and they keep their parents and family members hostage back in China."
From December 2025 through August 2026, Anthropic says it disrupted cases involving cyberattacks, influence campaigns, surveillance, scams, weapons development, biological research, and attempts to copy Claude’s capabilities. The threat report says AI is making sophisticated capabilities available to smaller groups that previously would have needed teams of highly trained specialists. This allows those groups to help attackers automate cyber operations, help governments monitor dissidents and help influence operators create fake news sites and social-media personas.
Anthropic also describes cases involving weapons software, biological research, and Chinese AI companies allegedly using Claude outputs to train competing models. In each case, Anthropic says it banned the accounts, improved its detection systems, and shared relevant information with authorities or other companies.
Still, Maginnis is sure that China is using AI to spy on and persecute Christians.
"It should be of concern to us if we are saying things that are not in support of the Chinese Communist Party," he says.
But he does not think that will be on the agenda when President Donald Trump meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the White House later this week.
"I think that they will bring up a number of AI issues, probably an AI hotline," Maginnis predicts.
