A Russian official attends a G20 energy meeting, and Anthropic thwarts AI spying operations

A Russian official will attend a G20 energy meeting in Houston next week, a White House official said on Friday.

Last month, the United States welcomed the attendance of Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov at a meeting of the G20 countries in North Carolina, the first time that the Russian Finance Minister attended the forum in person since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The G20 Ministerial Meeting on Energy Availability will be held from Monday to Wednesday in the presence of US officials, including Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and White House official Jarrod Again. The White House has not yet said who will attend next week’s meeting from the Russian side, according to what Reuters reported.

Energy sector officials from Europe and Asia are also expected to attend. The European Court of Auditors said this month that the European Union's efforts to break away from dependence on Russian oil and gas are faltering at a time when winter is approaching and gas stocks are unusually low.

Despite the name of the meeting, the two wars in Ukraine and Iran have made energy security a source of concern for many countries, as the price of diesel in the United States recorded an unprecedented number exceeding six dollars per gallon this week, and the Strait of Hormuz was also almost completely closed to shipments of oil and natural gas, and the construction of American data centers puts pressure on electricity supplies.

US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that he had a "wonderful" conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier in the week, and that the Russian leader wanted to reach an agreement to end the war in Ukraine.

Despite the latest visits by US envoys to Moscow and Kiev, intelligence officials in the United States, Ukraine and across Europe question Putin's seriousness in ending the war.

The US House of Representatives is likely to vote on imposing new sanctions on Russia during the G20 meeting, but it is uncertain whether the bill will be approved in that chamber as happened in the US Senate.

The Trump administration imposed sanctions on Russia for the first time over its war in Ukraine in October 2025, blocking transactions and freezing the assets of its two largest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday, during a visit to India to attend the BRICS conference, that the group's Western rivals are trying to restore their "former leadership" in an "inappropriate" manner.

He added, in his speech before the BRICS Summit Business Forum, that the West is resorting to destroying facilities and pipelines and seizing ships to maintain economic leadership, according to what was reported by Reuters news agency.

In turn, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said, on the sidelines of the summit, that the pressures on Tehran “have reached a dangerous stage” after the American-Israeli attack on it. He also promised that “the world is currently going through a period of unprecedented complexity.”

Pezeshkian said: “Iran has been subjected to severe sanctions in recent years, and these pressures have reached a critical and dangerous stage in recent months, after the military aggression launched by the United States and Israel against Iran.”

He added: “When a country is exposed to political and military pressure in the sectors of trade, energy, infrastructure, and the financial system, the repercussions of this go beyond its borders.”

Both Putin and Pezeshkyan arrived in India, on Friday, to participate in talks that precede a summit that brings together prominent leaders from the BRICS bloc, which includes 11 countries and is dominated by conflicts and economic challenges, especially those related to the Middle East.

It is expected that the war, which broke out in the Middle East in late February, as a result of the American and Israeli strikes on Iran, and those taking place in Ukraine, as well as the disturbances in global trade and oil prices, will dominate part of the discussions during the annual summit, which begins on Saturday and lasts for two days.

Anthropic announced on Thursday that it had closed several spying operations sponsored by countries that used its artificial intelligence models for surveillance, warning that governments and parties linked to them are increasingly using this technology to spy on minorities and political opponents, according to what was reported by Agence France-Presse.

The company stated in a report on the misuse of its models that these incidents, which were monitored and stopped between January and July, originated from China, Iran, and West Africa.

The report revealed that these surveillance campaigns “targeted the same diaspora and opposition communities that these regimes traditionally target, including pro-democracy figures in Hong Kong, Tibetan communities, and followers of the Falun Gong movement across Asia, in addition to Iranian minorities and opponents of the Iranian regime abroad.”

In one case, Iranian actors developed a way to identify people through their social media accounts, and in another, a contractor working for Mali's national security services used the CLOUD model to design "basic software that enabled intelligence gathering."

“AI is now being used as a substitute for the engineering workforce,” the report states.

Anthropic also thwarted attempts by users to design weapons, conduct questionable biological research, and create scams through dating apps.

“Distillation” of data

The San Francisco-based company accused Chinese developers of using the “Cloud” model in a misleading way to respond to user inquiries, while at the same time they were “distilling” that data to improve their own models.

The term “distillation” refers to the process of using one artificial intelligence model to train another model.

Chinese developers have previously been accused of using this technology without permission, which constitutes the theft of resources from American laboratories such as Anthropic and Open AI.

Anthropic claims that Chinese companies Moonshot and DeepSeek also secretly used the Cloud model to generate answers for their users.

The report stated that “in one case, over a period of ten days, Moonshot transferred about 300,000 requests from its customers to Anthropic through a network of 5,380 fake accounts, most of which appeared to be located in Singapore and Japan.”

Some of this data included sensitive information about users, which may constitute a violation of privacy agreements.

The report explained: “We do not know whether (Moonshot) informed its customers that their orders were being transferred to (Anthropic) and disclosed to a third party.”

Deep Sec also used similar techniques.

Regarding research, Anthropic monitored and banned research related to biological weapons, as the intentions of the parties involved were not completely clear, but it did not reveal their identities.

“The individuals involved in these studies are scientists in practice,” the report stated. We do not confirm that they intended to cause harm, and revealing their identities or their laboratories may expose them to danger.”

Scientific research included work on the mosquito-borne chikungunya virus, a highly contagious strain of bird influenza virus, and a family of viruses that includes smallpox and monkeypox, in addition to animal toxins and other toxic substances.