On the James River, Petersburg, VA, June of 1864, during the American Civil War, General Benjamin Butler, of the US Army, deployed a new weapon into the field that effectively altered the nature of kinetic battles. The later named “Siege of Petersburg,” was the first recorded instance of the Gatling gun being used in battle. With a rate of fire coming in at 200 plus rounds per minute, the opposing Confederate troops’ muskets were a meager retort to the high velocity barrage of bullets directed at them.
Much more recently, in September of 2025, 30 US companies and government agencies were hit with a cyberattack; an effective, large-scale cyber espionage campaign that resulted in data exfiltration, operational impact and undisclosed financial loss. What was unique and novel about this attack was its high degree of automation. The Chinese state-sponsored group (GTG-1002), thought to be responsible for the attack, leveraged Anthropic’s “Claude Code” (a coding assistant) to execute an estimated 90% of the tactical operations with minimal human intervention.
This was the world’s largest agentic AI-driven attack to date. The hackers used “prompt injection” and role-playing techniques to manipulate the AI into believing it was performing legitimate defensive cybersecurity testing for a firm. This method was used to bypass the AI’s safety protocols and generate malicious code.
