Leaderboard / Case No. FB-2025-08-27-anthropic-north-korea-it-workers
North Korean operatives used Claude to invent professional personas, pass technical interviews and do the day-to-day work of remote engineering jobs at Western tech firms, earning salaries that fund the regime in breach of sanctions.
Score breakdown
| Component | Value | Reasoning |
|---|---|---|
| Sentence-Years | 40 | 50 USC 1705, 18 USC 1343. Earning money for North Korea through hidden employment violates the North Korea sanctions regulations enforced under IEEPA (50 USC 1705), and obtaining salaries under false identities is wire fraud (18 USC 1343). |
| × Contribution | 0.5 | Wrote the content: Anthropic says operators used Claude to "generate convincing professional backgrounds", tailor resumes, prepare interview answers, get "real-time assistance during coding assessments" and, once hired, to "deliver actual technical work" (about 80% of their usage); humans held the jobs, so this is written content. |
| × Blast Radius | 1.5 | The public: The scheme exists to "evade international sanctions and generate profit for the regime", which is a crime against society at large, so the victim is the public; the deceived employers are listed as a second victim. |
| × Legal status | 1 | Crime. |
| + Tradecraft | 0 | None of the rubric's intrusion techniques apply to employment fraud. |
| + Guardrails | 0 | Guardrails intact: The report describes no jailbreak or safety bypass; the model was used as shipped. |
| + Dwell Time | 0 | Anthropic gives no dates for the activity, so date_precision is before with the report's publication date; dwell is counted from that latest possible date (0 days) and never inflated. Anthropic found the accounts itself, building on public reporting and threat-intelligence sharing. |
| Total | 30 |
Charges the human could face
50 USC 1705Up to 20 years18 USC 1343Up to 20 years