Houthi rebels responsible for deadly missile strikes in Saudi Arabia have been using Anthropic’s artificial intelligence to make warheads, the US firm has admitted.

The makers of Claude revealed in a report last month that the Yemen-based fighters launched three weapons programmes using their AI products.

Over the weekend, the Houthis launched their most devastating attacks on Saudi Arabia to date.

The multi-billion pound company’s report provides the clearest evidence yet of how AI could redraw the geopolitical landscape in the Gulf and elsewhere.

In a section entitled ‘Disrupting a Yemen-based guided weapons engineering cell’ the authors described how they identified a terrorist cell running three programmes, all using Claude.

Claude is capable of a wide variety of conversational and text-based teaching programmes on almost all areas of human activity.

In this case the AI engine condensed the knowledge of the world’s leading rocket scientists, which was then accessed by terrorists, the Anthropic report said.

It added: ‘Threat actors based in northern Yemen [were] running three weapons development programmes: a guided rocket that used a commodity, phone-class flight computer with final phase homing guidance, a multi-stage ballistic missile with a stated range goal of more than 1,500 miles and a multi-variant missile, referred to as the R2000, that included a hypersonic glide vehicle variant.’

The threat actors, understood to be Houthis, used Claude Code in place of human software engineers to develop the guidance, navigation and control software that steers and stabilises a flying vehicle.

Claude Code provided position estimation software, tuned the control settings, ran a firmware build pipeline and when warheads missed their targets adapted itself to improve their accuracy.

Read More: Anthropic admits Houthis used Claude AI instead of weapons engineers to make rockets and ballistic missiles that correct themselves after missing targets