Reuters: Chinese Hacker Breached 100+ Firms Including Deere and Cummins for $5K Using Claude Code and DeepSeek Agents

NorForge researcher Snorre Fagerland disclosed to Reuters that a Chinese-speaking actor used the open-source Cairn agent platform wired to Anthropic's Claude Code and DeepSeek V4 Pro to target 1,200+ websites and successfully breach more than 100 companies — including John Deere, SharkNinja, and Cummins — across the US, Canada, Australia, and Japan since September 25. The whole campaign cost roughly $5,000 in tokens, about $50 per successful intrusion, with the agents running ~23 hours per target off fewer than 100 Chinese-character instructions. Fagerland told Reuters 'it's not script kiddie stuff' — the first documented commercial-AI-agent mass breach without human-in-the-loop.