Chinese intelligence operatives spoofed an Anthropic executive and ex-White House official in a phishing campaign, impersonating an AI policy advisory committee.

A suspected Chinese espionage group impersonated senior AI policy figures, including a high-ranking Anthropic employee and a former White House official, in phishing campaigns targeting AI policy experts at U.S. universities, think tanks, and law firms, according to security researchers at Proofpoint. The campaigns concentrated in July 2026 and were attributed to TA419, a China-aligned threat actor.

Beginning July 8, TA419 sent phishing emails impersonating Lynne Edwards Parker, the former principal deputy director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Heidi Crebo-Rediker, a prominent economist and foreign policy expert. The messages invited targets to join a fake AI policy advisory committee or contribute to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report on AI export controls and supply chains. When targets responded, they received shortened URLs purporting to share additional details but actually linking to attacker-controlled domains.

The phishing infrastructure deployed a Cloudflare Turnstile verification screen disguised as a OneDrive login, which then redirected victims to an attacker-in-the-middle (AitM) credential phishing page designed to steal cloud account credentials. The July campaigns used driftshare[.]co as the first-stage domain and globalfileshareplatform[.]com as the second-stage domain.

In February, TA419 spoofed a senior Anthropic employee to target an AI policy analyst at a U.S. think tank, with the subject line "Request for Feedback on Military Integration of Claude."

The phishing infrastructure targets Microsoft 365 and Entra ID through the OfficeHome application, built on the open-source Frameless BitB framework. This toolkit incorporates a Browser-in-the-Browser overlay and Evilginx phishlet to intercept usernames, passwords, and session cookies, along with server-side substitution rules to inject the kit into proxied pages. TA419 typically uses Cloudflare's content delivery network to obscure backend hosting infrastructure.

TA419's credential phishing domains are themed around file-sharing and cloud services—including msfile[.]online and onecloudfilesync[.]com—and the group also impersonates specific organizations, including the Japan-Taiwan Exchange Association (tw-koryu[.]org), The Heritage Foundation (heritiages[.]org and heritiage[.]org), and Japanese Defense Minister Shinjirō Koizumi's official website (shinjirou[.]info).

Proofpoint assesses that TA419 and other Beijing-aligned groups will likely continue targeting AI and other policy experts working on technologies of strategic interest to China. Researchers recommend that targeted organizations adopt phishing-resistant, origin-bound authentication mechanisms such as passkeys.