Anthropic’s most succesful AI mannequin has already discovered hundreds of AI cybersecurity vulnerabilities throughout each main working system and net browser. The corporate’s response was to not launch it, however to quietly hand it to the organisations answerable for holding the web operating.
That mannequin is Claude Mythos Preview, and the initiative known as Project Glasswing.
The launch companions embrace Amazon Net Companies, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorganChase, the Linux Basis, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Palo Alto Networks.
Past that core group, Anthropic has prolonged entry to over 40 further organisations that construct or keep essential software program infrastructure. Anthropic is committing as much as US$100 million in utilization credit for Mythos Preview throughout the trouble, together with US$4 million in direct donations to open-source safety organisations.
A mannequin that outgrew its personal benchmarks
Mythos Preview was not particularly educated for cybersecurity work. Anthropic stated the capabilities “emerged as a downstream consequence of common enhancements in code, reasoning, and autonomy”, and that the identical enhancements making the mannequin higher at patching vulnerabilities additionally make it higher at exploiting them.
That final half issues. Mythos Preview has improved to the extent that it largely saturates present safety benchmarks, forcing Anthropic to shift its focus to novel real-world duties–particularly, zero-day vulnerabilities. These flaws have been beforehand unknown to the software program’s builders.
Among the many findings: a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD, an working system identified for its robust safety posture. In one other case, the mannequin absolutely autonomously recognized and exploited a 17-year-old distant code execution vulnerability in FreeBSD–CVE-2026-4747–that enables an unauthenticated person anyplace on the web to acquire full management of a server operating NFS. No human was concerned within the discovery or exploitation after the preliminary immediate to search out the bug.
Nicholas Carlini from Anthropic’s analysis group described the mannequin’s potential to chain collectively vulnerabilities: “This mannequin can create exploits out of three, 4, or typically 5 vulnerabilities that in sequence offer you some sort of very subtle finish final result. I’ve discovered extra bugs within the final couple of weeks than I discovered in the remainder of my life mixed.”
Why is it not being launched?
“We don’t plan to make Claude Mythos Preview usually obtainable resulting from its cybersecurity capabilities,” Newton Cheng, Frontier Crimson Crew Cyber Lead at Anthropic, stated. “Given the speed of AI progress, it won’t be lengthy earlier than such capabilities proliferate, doubtlessly past actors who’re dedicated to deploying them safely. The fallout–for economies, public security, and nationwide safety–may very well be extreme.”
This isn’t hypothetical. Anthropic had beforehand disclosed what it described as the primary documented case of a cyberattack largely executed by AI–a Chinese language state-sponsored group that used AI brokers to autonomously infiltrate roughly 30 international targets, with AI dealing with the vast majority of tactical operations independently.
The corporate has additionally privately briefed senior US authorities officers on Mythos Preview’s full capabilities. The intelligence group is now actively weighing how the mannequin might reshape each offensive and defensive hacking operations.
The open-source drawback
One dimension of Undertaking Glasswing that goes past the headline coalition: open-source software program. Jim Zemlin, CEO of the Linux Basis, put it plainly: “Up to now, safety experience has been a luxurious reserved for organisations with massive safety groups. Open-source maintainers, whose software program underpins a lot of the world’s essential infrastructure, have traditionally been left to determine safety on their very own.”
Anthropic has donated US$2.5 million to Alpha-Omega and OpenSSF by the Linux Basis, and US$1.5 million to the Apache Software program Basis–giving maintainers of essential open-source codebases entry to AI cybersecurity vulnerability scanning at a scale that was beforehand out of attain.
What comes subsequent
Anthropic says its eventual aim is to deploy Mythos-class fashions at scale, however solely when new safeguards are in place. The corporate plans to launch new safeguards with an upcoming Claude Opus mannequin first, permitting it to refine them with a mannequin that doesn’t pose the identical stage of threat as Mythos Preview.
The aggressive image is already shifting round it. When OpenAI launched GPT-5.3-Codex in February, the corporate referred to as it the primary mannequin it had labeled as high-capability for cybersecurity duties underneath its Preparedness Framework. Anthropic’s transfer with Glasswing indicators that the frontier labs see managed deployment–not open launch–because the rising commonplace for fashions at this functionality stage.
Whether or not that commonplace holds as these capabilities unfold additional is, at this level, an open query that no single initiative can reply.
See Additionally: Anthropic’s refusal to arm AI is strictly why the UK desires it
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