Anthropic has triggered alarm bells by touting the terrifying capabilities of “Claude Mythos” – with executives warning that the new AI model is so dangerous it would cause a wave of catastrophic hacks and terror attacks if released to the wider public.
In a nightmarish analysis, Anthropic itself revealed that Mythos – if it fell into the wrong hands – could easily exploit critical infrastructure like electric grids, power plants and hospitals. The model has already “found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser,” according to the AI company.
Rather than a wide release, Anthropic, led by CEO Dario Amodei, has unveiled “Project Glasswing,” a plan to provide the model to a handpicked group of about 40 companies, including Amazon, Google, Apple, Nvidia, CrowdStrike, and JPMorgan Chase, which will receive early access to Mythos so they can use it to find and fix security flaws.
The corporate-only rollout is likely Anthropic’s best possible way to “give it to the guys to patch the holes, but not to the hackers that are going to find more holes,” Roman Yampolskiy, an AI safety researcher at the University of Louisville, told The Post.
“Most likely, of course, there’s going to be a leakage of some kind,” he said. “Any level of restriction is preferred over complete open access. Ideally, I would love to see this not developed in the first place. And it’s not like they’re going to stop.
“That’s exactly what we expect from those models – they’re going to become better at developing hacking tools, biological weapons, chemical weapons, novel weapons we can’t even envision,” Yampolskiy added.
In one instance detailed in Anthropic’s testing, Mythos broke out of a secure “sandbox” meant to restrict internet access – with a researcher only finding out “by receiving an unexpected email from the model while eating a sandwich in a park.” In another case, Mythos found a flaw in the OpenBSD operating system that had been hidden in plain sight for 27 years.
Despite the risks, Anthropic argues Project Glasswing will help the US’ defensive capabilities as adversaries in Iran, China and Russia become ever more aggressive about targeting critical infrastructure.
An Anthropic official said the company “focused on organizations whose software represents the largest share of the world’s shared cyberattack surface.
“These are the companies that build and maintain the operating systems, browsers, cloud platforms, and financial infrastructure that billions of people rely on every day,” the official said. “When you find a vulnerability in one of their systems and it gets patched, that patch protects everyone who uses that software — in many cases, hundreds of millions of people.”
Anthropic said it is in active discussions with US government officials about how Mythos can aid the country’s cyber capabilities — both offensive and defensive.
“Claude Mythos Preview demonstrates what is now possible for defenders at scale, and adversaries will inevitably look to exploit the same capabilities,” said Elia Zaitsev, chief technology officer at CrowdStrike.
While Mythos appears to be a major leap forward technologically, critics are uncertain about whether Anthropic’s actions – including the splashy public announcement – match its rhetoric about the risks.
Perry Metzger, chairman of Alliance for the Future, a Washington, DC-based AI policy group, noted that the hype about Mythos as a product has “spread like wildfire” as a result of the company’s warning.
“You’d better carefully pay for access to Glasswing or get in on it, because only they are responsible enough to decide who should and shouldn’t have access. They’re the experts, after all,” Metzger sarcastically said. “I find the whole thing maddening.”
As The Post has reported, Anthropic’s critics, including President Trump’s AI adviser David Sacks and others in the White House, have claimed the company’s safety warnings are actually an elaborate attempt at “regulatory capture” – Silicon Valley lingo for crafting the rules in such a way that they benefit and their rivals struggle.
“At every point in the conversation around the emergence of AI, Dario Amodei believes he, and he alone is qualified to determine what this technology can do, who can access it,” said Nathan Leamer, executive director of the advocacy group Build American AI. “He alone is the modern Solomon who will decide what entity will regulate it. Who needs the public square?”
Another tech industry insider, who spoke to The Post on condition of anonymity, pointed out that OpenAI similarly warned in 2019 that GPT-2, an early version of its chatbot model, was too dangerous for release.
Amodei and Anthropic’s top policy executive Jack Clark were both working at OpenAI at the time.
The insider speculated that the limited release could have more to do with Anthropic’s struggle to keep pace with compute demand than safety fears.
“They are trying to deflect from the fact that they can’t serve the model because they have no compute,” the person said.
