Anthropic Announces Claude Mythos Preview, Withholds Public Release Due to Cybersecurity Risks

Anthropic announced Claude Mythos Preview on Tuesday, describing it as an AI model adept at exposing software weaknesses.

The model has identified thousands of vulnerabilities in commonly used applications, including exploits in major operating systems and browsers. No patches exist for many of these issues, which had remained undetected in some cases for decades.

Anthropic is withholding wide distribution of Mythos to mitigate risks of enabling widespread hacking. Access is limited to a consortium of tech firms. These partners will use the model to scan and secure bugs in their software. The company formed an alliance with cybersecurity specialists to bolster defenses against hacking.

Anthropic stated that compute costs did not factor into the decision to gate access, and the restriction was not a business optimization. Sandboxing was disabled during tests, which limited insights into the model's real-world behavior. Sources differ on the announcement's significance.

The New York Times described it as a cybersecurity reckoning, while a critic called it overblown, noting that cheap open-weight models can perform similar tasks and no evidence shows Mythos as a major qualitative jump.

models have increasingly been used in sophisticated cyberattacks by criminal and state-backed groups, as reported by Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Prior warnings from cybersecurity experts highlighted the potential chaos from highly capable hacking bots, emphasizing speed and scale over ingenuity.

Mythos represents a shift, with capabilities previously thought impossible, according to Anthropic. The model's potential extends to commandeering computer servers, hacking banks, exfiltrating state secrets, and disrupting infrastructure. Such attacks are typically limited to elite, state-sponsored groups in countries including China, Russia, and the United States.