In recent weeks, the AI world has been a-buzz following claims made by leading firm, Anthropic, regarding its new model, Claude Mythos. The company says it found the tool can outperform humans at some hacking and cyber-security tasks, which has prompted discussions by regulators, legislators and financial institutions about the dangers it could pose to digital services. Several tech giants have been given access to Mythos via an initiative called Project Glasswing, designed to strengthen resilience to Mythos itself.
But others point out that it is in Anthropic's interests to suggest its tool has never-seen-before capabilities, meaning - as ever with AI - the job of distinguishing between justified claims and hype can be tricky. Mythos is one of Anthropic's latest models developed as part of its broader AI system called Claude. It encompasses the company's AI assistant and family of models, rivalling OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini.
It was revealed by Anthropic in early April as "Mythos Preview". Researchers who test how AI models handle particular requests or tasks, known as "red-teams", said in a report Mythos was "strikingly capable at computer security tasks". They found the tool could locate dormant bugs lurking in decades-old code and easily exploit them.
So rather than make it widely available to Claude users, Anthropic gave 12 tech companies access via Project Glasswing, which it described as "an effort to secure the world's most critical software". They include cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services, device manufacturers Apple, Microsoft and Google, and chip-makers Nvidia and Broadcom. Crowdstrike, whose faulty software update caused a major global outage in July 2024, is also among the project's partners, with Anthropic saying it has also given access to Mythos to more than 40 organisations responsible for critical software.
In a video released alongside Project Glasswing's launch, Anthropic boss Dario Amodei said it had offered to work with US government officials to "help defend against the risk of these models". Anthropic says during tests it found the model was highly skilled at cyber-security and hacking tasks, outperforming humans. "Mythos Preview has already found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser," Anthropic claimed on 7 April.
"Given the rate of AI progress, it will not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who are committed to deploying them safely." It said it could locate - without much oversight - critical bugs in need of immediate action in old systems, including one vulnerability which had been present in a system for 27 years, and suggest ways to exploit them. Some finance ministers, central bankers and financiers have since expressed serious concerns about it, fearing the model could undermine the security of financial systems. Canadian finance minister François-Philippe Champagne told the BBC Mythos had been discussed at a International Monetary Fund (IMF) meeting in Washington DC this week.
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