Day: September 15, 2025

• North Korean hackers recently used ChatGPT to make fake military IDs in phishing emails.
• Pyongyang hackers aren’t new to using AI to supercharge espionage. Chinese groups are doing it too.
• OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have detailed cases of their chatbots being misused by these hackers.

From bogus IDs to made-up résumés, North Korean and Chinese hackers have been using AI tools to supercharge espionage and slip into companies and other targets.

In the latest case, a North Korean hacking group known as Kimusky used ChatGPT to generate a fake draft of a South Korean military ID. The fake IDs were attached to phishing emails that impersonated a South Korean defense institution responsible for issuing credentials to military-affiliated officials, South Korean cybersecurity firm Genians said in a blog post published Monday.

Kimsuky has been linked to a string of espionage campaigns against individuals and organizations in South Korea, Japan, and the US. In 2020, the US Department of Homeland Security said the group is “most likely tasked by the North Korean regime with a global intelligence-gathering mission.”

ChatGPT blocks attempts to generate official government IDs. But the model could be coaxed into producing convincing mock-ups if the prompt was framed as a “sample design for legitimate purposes rather than reproducing an actual military ID,” Genians said.

This is not the first time North Korean hackers have used AI to infiltrate foreign entities. Anthropic said in a report last month that North Korean hackers used its Claude tool to secure and maintain fraudulent remote employment at American Fortune 500 tech companies. The hackers used Claude to spin up convincing résumés and portfolios, pass coding tests, and even complete real technical assignments once they were on the job.

US officials said last year that North Korea was placing people in remote positions in US firms using false or stolen identities as part of a mass extortion scheme.

China’s hackers are doing it, too

Anthropic said in the same report that a Chinese actor spent over nine months using Claude as a full-stack cyberattack assistant to target major Vietnamese telecommunications providers, agricultural systems, and government databases.

The hacker used Claude as a “technical advisor, code developer, security analyst, and operational consultant throughout their campaign,” Anthropic said.

Anthropic said it had implemented new ways to detect misuse of its tools.

Chinese hackers have also been turning to ChatGPT for help with their cyber campaigns, according to an OpenAI report published in June. The hackers asked the chatbot to generate code for “password bruteforcing”— scripts that guess thousands of username and password combinations until one works. They used ChatGPT to dig up information on US defense networks, satellite systems, and government ID verification cards.

The OpenAI report flagged a China-based influence operation that used ChatGPT to generate social media posts designed to stoke division in US politics, including fake profile images to make the accounts look like real people.

“Every operation we disrupt gives us a better understanding of how threat actors are trying to abuse our models, and enables us to refine our defenses,” OpenAI said in the June report.

It’s not just Claude and ChatGPT. North Korean and Chinese hackers have experimented with Google’s Gemini to expand their operations. Chinese groups used the chatbot to troubleshoot code and obtain “deeper access to target networks,” while North Korean actors used Gemini to draft fake cover letters and scout IT job postings, Google said in a January report.

Google said Gemini’s safeguards prevented hackers from using it for more sophisticated attacks, such as accessing information to manipulate Google’s own products.

OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. The companies have said they published their findings on hackers to help others improve security.

AI makes hacking easier

Cybersecurity experts have long warned that AI has the capacity to make hacking and disinformation operations easier.

Hackers have been using AI models to infiltrate companies, Yuval Fernbach, the chief technology officer of machine learning operations at software supply chain company JFrog, told Business Insider in a report published in April.

“We are seeing many, many attacks,” Fernbach said, adding that malicious code is easily hidden inside open-source large language models. Hackers typically shut things down, steal information, or change the output of a website or tool.

Online businesses have also been hit by deepfakes and scams. Rob Duncan, the VP of strategy at the cybersecurity firm Netcraft, told Business Insider in a June report that he isn’t surprised at the surge in personalized phishing attacks against small businesses.

GenAI tools now allow even a novice lone wolf with little technical know-how to clone a brand’s image and write flawless, convincing scam messages within minutes, Duncan said. With cheap tools, “attackers can more easily spoof employees, fool customers, or impersonate partners across multiple channels,” he added.

• AI is transforming corporate America, but its growth is understated in government data.
• AI added $160 billion to the US economy, but only $45 billion shows up in GDP, Goldman Sachs says.
• Goldman Sachs says GDP undercounts AI’s impact because semiconductors are treated as intermediate inputs.

Artificial intelligence is transforming corporate America, yet the boom remains understated in government growth statistics, according to Goldman Sachs.

Analysts at Goldman pointed to the scale of the boom in a Saturday note: “Revenue at US companies providing AI infrastructure has risen by $400bn since 2022, which at first glance seems to suggest that AI has been a meaningful driver of economic growth recently.”

But official numbers tell a different story.

AI technology has lifted real US economic activity by about $160 billion since 2022, or 0.7% of GDP, the analysts calculated. Yet only around $45 billion, or 0.2% of GDP, of AI-spurred growth has been recorded in official statistics. That leaves roughly $115 billion uncounted, according to the analysts.

That gap highlights the difference between what companies report and what the government measures due to the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis method for calculating growth.

“The measured impact of AI on GDP is likely much smaller because the BEA’s methodology for estimating GDP treats semiconductors as intermediate inputs, which are only counted towards final demand when the products (e.g., consumer laptops) that they enable are sold,” wrote the Goldman analysts.

So, high-performance semiconductors — the chips powering AI training — are classified as intermediate inputs. When they’re imported, the value is deducted from GDP, and their use in building AI systems doesn’t appear as investment.

However, the chips developed in recent years are being used for training and supporting AI models — essentially “building an intangible asset of which the ultimate output value has not been fully capitalized or measured in GDP,” the analysts wrote.

Goldman’s analysts estimated that around $75 billion spent on developing AI models and enterprise solutions in the cloud has not been counted in investment statistics.

New import policies complicated the picture further.

In the first half of 2025, business investment in information-processing equipment appeared to jump, largely because companies rushed to import servers and networking gear ahead of President Donald Trump’s import tariffs.

The trend “probably reflects one-time frontloading ahead of tariffs and thus exaggerates normal AI investment demand,” the analysts wrote. Because imports are subtracted from GDP, the investment boost was partly offset.

AI’s impact is hard to pin down in other important indicators. Companies, too, are struggling to show it in their bottom lines.

While a record share of S&P 500 firms mentioned AI on earnings calls in the second quarter of the year, “the share of companies quantifying the impact of AI on earnings today remains limited,” according to a separate report from Goldman Sachs earlier this month.