AI guardrails failed to stop cybercrime hackers

CrowdStrike research shows that four cybercrime groups using Chinese, Spanish and English, Indonesian, and Russian respectively carried out attacks between May and August using agentic AI connected to Claude and DeepSeek models, bypassing model guardrails and compromising multiple targets. The research says these groups enabled attack activity to run autonomously for extended periods; the Spanish- and English-speaking group targeted Argentine healthcare entities, compromising at least 15 institutions and stealing credentials and medical records from at least one victim. The Chinese-speaking group compromised government targets in Brazil and Colombia and also used a runtime patch called ClawGod, attempting to remove the CYBER_RISK_INSTRUCTION directive from the Claude Code system prompt. The researchers said the attackers mainly used older versions of the models and used model routing to select models with differing guardrails; all four groups exposed their AI infrastructure on public internet servers, allowing researchers to analyze their activity. Anthropic declined to comment, and DeepSeek did not immediately respond to WIRED's request for comment.