Yemen’s Houthis used Anthropic AI to develop ballistic missiles

October 14, 2026

NEW DELHI – Anthropic has admitted in a threat intelligence report that several actors linked to Houthis in northern Yemen used its Claude AI model to develop guidance, control and navigation software for its ballistic missiles.

The report, titled ‘Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026,’ did not name the Iranian-backed Houthis, but stated that it “identified a cell of threat actors based in northern Yemen” — much of which is controlled by the Houthi rebels — “running three weapons development programmes”.

It further highlights the growing risk of advanced AI falling into the wrong hands.

Under a section titled “Disrupting a Yemen-based guided weapons engineering cell”, the US company noted that the actors used Claude Code in place of human software engineers for developing guidance, navigation and control (GNC) software that steers and stabilises a flying vehicle.

“They used Claude to integrate an open-source autopilot onto a phone-class flight computer, writing the control and position estimation software, tuning the control settings, running a firmware build pipeline, and performing a flight simulation,” Anthropic stated, according to reports.

However, it noted that they do not have evidence the actors succeeded in fielding an operational device, “but they did test-fire a guided rocket. This field test appears to have failed: within hours, the actors returned to Claude to work out why it failed”.

Also, the report suggested that scientists made multiple attempts to use Claude to research biological weapons.

Anthropic stated in its report that the Yemeni cell sought to develop weapons including a multi-stage ballistic missile, a multi-variant missile, and a guided rocket that used a “commodity phone-class flight computer”.