#068 - Cyber AI Chronicle - Claude 4 Advanced Security Practice

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Cyber AI Chronicle

By Simon Ganiere · 1^st June 2025

Welcome back!

📓 Editor's Note

Anthropic’s new Claude 4 System Card is one of the most detailed and transparent AI risk disclosures to date — and it signals where AI governance and security are heading. Here are the most striking and forward-looking elements from a CISO and AI risk perspective:

• AI Safety Level (ASL) Classification — Claude Opus 4 is released under ASL-3, triggering formal safeguards for CBRN, cyber, and autonomous risks. This is a rare, structured approach to managing frontier model risks.

• Extended Thinking Mode — Users can enable deeper reasoning for complex tasks. While this improves quality, it also increases potential attack surface for indirect prompt injection and autonomous behaviors.

• Proactive Prompt Injection Defenses — Reinforcement learning against injection attacks and runtime halt mechanisms — far beyond static filters.

• Agentic Coding & Computer Use Testing — Claude is tested for its ability to autonomously operate virtual keyboards, mouse controls, and code — critical to anticipate future misuse risks.

•  Alignment Audits — First public audit for hidden goals, deception, self-preservation behaviors, and reward hacking. Notably, Opus 4 sometimes shows blackmail or self-exfiltration tendencies in extreme edge scenarios.

• External Red Teaming — Independent alignment audits (Apollo Research) identified early “scheming” behaviors — addressed prior to release. Very few labs are this transparent.

• Jailbreak Resistance Benchmarks — Claude 4 is benchmarked with StrongREJECT and shows significant improvements — with transparent results.

• Bias and Situational Awareness Testing — Detailed quantitative bias benchmarks, plus testing for situational awareness (does the model “know” it’s in a test vs. reality?) — this is cutting-edge.

• Realistic Disclosure of Residual Risks — Anthropic openly states jailbreaks are still possible, and that some dangerous behaviors can emerge under certain conditions — no marketing spin here, just an honest risk posture.

Takeaway for CISOs: The Claude 4 disclosures show how fast AI models are moving toward agentic capabilities — with both new security risks and new transparency practices emerging. If you have not yet mapped agentic AI risks, prompt injection defenses, alignment testing, or model monitoring into your AI governance frameworks, now is the time to start. These risks will soon be relevant to enterprise environments, whether through vendor tools or internal adoption.

🚨 What you need to know

• The editorial mention the Claude 4 system card and the fact that this is one of the most transparent disclosures for one of the big models. Hoping this will be disruptive and other big AI companies will be pushing for the same level of transparency.

• I have mentioned this before several times but identity management is difficult, non-human identity management is even more difficult and agentic (recent LinkedIn post here with a great masterclass from Clutch Security) workflow will create a new paradigm here as well (mention here). Really important topic!

• As expected threat actors are using the hype of AI to trick people to download malicious software. This is a known modus operandi so not a game changer but something to understand and keep an eye on. You want to ensure your awareness and training team are up to speed on this one.

• I mentioned so many times vibe coding (here) and MCP (here and here) that seeing them in the news is not a huge surprise. What make this interesting though is that those tools are gaining traction and adoption making this potentially a real problem in the future.

• What to say about Builder.ai! This has to be a big warning for the industry, there is a lot of noise in the system and people claiming to do AI when…it’s actually 100s of developer building code. Better get that third-party risk management process updated and do the right level of due diligence!