Fake Claude install guides sit on the real claude.ai site and are promoted through Google ads. Following them can put spying software on a Windows PC.
Scammers are using Claude's own website to trick people into installing malware. Security firm Gen Digital found fake guides for installing the Claude app hosted on the real claude.ai address. Because the web address is genuine, the usual advice to look for typos or odd domain names does not help here.
Gen Digital, the company behind Norton and Avast antivirus, reported two malicious campaigns. The attackers used two Claude features that let any user publish content: Artifacts and shared chats. Anyone can create a page this way, and it appears under the official domain.
The pages are promoted through paid Google search ads. Tracking tags in the links point to that. So a person searching for the Claude app can land on a fake guide by clicking an ad.
One page is titled "Install Claude on Windows." It tells visitors to press Win + R, paste text with Ctrl + V, and press Enter. That runs a PowerShell command, a built-in Windows tool, which pulls extra code from GitHub.
The end result is a Remote Access Trojan, or RAT. It can take screenshots, search for cryptocurrency wallets and wait for further orders from the attackers. The method is called ClickFix. The victim runs the command personally, so many of the operating system's built-in protections do not step in.
This is not a one-off. In July, a Bing ad led to a similar page on claude.ai. In early October, a fake ChatGPT Plus page on chatgpt.com spread Trojan software. A few days later, BleepingComputer recorded another Google Ads campaign aimed at Claude users.
Claude does label shared content, but the Artifacts feature shows only a thin banner saying a user created it and it is not verified. Gen Digital stresses that the domain still looks extremely trustworthy.
Anthropic's only official download page for the desktop app is claude.com/download, with standard installers for macOS and Windows. Anyone who got the app there is fine. Any guide that asks you to paste commands into Terminal or PowerShell to install the app is a fraud. The one exception is Claude Code, a developer tool installed from the command line by following Anthropic's official documentation.
The alert box above lists the steps, including what to do if a command has already been run. The short version is to avoid search ads and reach the download page yourself.
Anthropic has not commented, and there is no word on whether the dangerous pages were removed. It is also unclear how many people were affected.
Type claude.com/download yourself or use a bookmark, and never paste a command into Windows to install an everyday app.
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