Anthropic's AI found thousands of flaws in every major OS and browser -- and cybercrime losses just hit $21 billion

As technology grows in power, cybercrime becomes a bigger and costlier problem -- especially as agentic AI becomes more and more capable.

Last year, Anthropic said that hackers used its Claude code tool (1) to attempt to infiltrate around 30 targets, including financial institutions and government agencies. Anthropic says this was the first time a large-scale cyberattack was carried out "without substantial human intervention."

Must Read

• Thanks to Jeff Bezos, you can now become a landlord for as little as $100 -- and no, you don't have to deal with tenants or fix freezers. Here's how

• Robert Kiyosaki this 1 asset will surge 400% in a year and begs investors not to miss this 'explosion'

• Taxes are going to change for retirees under Trump's 'big beautiful bill' -- here are 4 reasons you can't afford to waste time

On April 7, Anthropic announced an initiative to help protect against bad actors: Project Glasswing (2). Anthropic says that Project Glasswing was formed because its new Claude model, Claude Mythos, "has already found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser."

Anthropic says that it and its Project Glasswing Partners, which include Apple, Google, JPMorganChase, and Microsoft, hope to use Claude Mythos to identify these vulnerabilities and fix them before other AI models can exploit them. But the model could also be used to exploit the same vulnerabilities Anthropic is trying to shore up, causing heavy economic losses.

Here's what to know about how AI's role in cybercrime, as well as the impact it can have on the world economy.

The economic impacts of AI cyberattacks

According to the 2025 Internet Crime Report from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (3), yearly cybercrime complaints have gone up from a little under 800,000 to over 1,000,000 since 2020. In that time, yearly losses from cybercrime have gone from $4.2 billion to almost $21 billion, quintupling in the span of five years.

Those numbers only represent the direct losses reported to the FBI. Total costs to businesses are likely orders of magnitude higher, although the World Bank says it's difficult to give accurate estimates (4) thanks to the indirect costs of cybercrime.

In 2025, the FBI first started tracking how many of its complaints mentioned AI. At the time, about 2% of complaints were AI-related (3). Those AI-related complaints accounted for around 4% of reported losses -- almost $900 million.

Those numbers could be going up in the near future. If, as Anthropic has said, AI is able to exploit OS and browser vulnerabilities that even highly experienced hackers aren't able to find, then the barrier to entry for cybercriminals becomes much lower.