Behind the Curtain: AI's scary phase
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Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios
Anthropic has begun a tightly controlled release of Mythos, the first AI model that officials believe is capable of bringing down a Fortune 100 company, crippling swaths of the internet or penetrating vital national defense systems.
Why it matters: This is the scary phase of AI — a model deemed so powerful that its full release into the wild could unleash untold catastrophe. So only carefully vetted companies and organizations, about 40 so far, are getting access.
Based on our conversations with government and private-sector officials briefed on Mythos, this isn't hyperbole. It's reality.
- Some inside the government fear that most top leaders are oblivious to the sudden danger from terrorists or hostile powers.
- "D.C. governs by crisis," said a source briefed on Mythos. "Until this is a crisis, and gets the attention and resources it deserves, cyber is kind of a backwater."
The big picture: Think of Mythos as a generational leap beyond Anthropic's existing models.
- It's an AI capable of not just identifying weaknesses in security systems, but exploiting them with autonomous, never-before-seen precision.
- It plans and executes attack sequences on its own, moving across systems without waiting for human direction.
Mind-blowing disclosure: In announcing the tightly confined release of Mythos on Tuesday, Anthropic disclosed that during testing, the model broke out of its "sandbox" testing environment and built a "moderately sophisticated multi-step exploit" to get the run of the internet, when it was supposed to have access only to certain services.
- The model demonstrated a "potentially dangerous capability for circumventing our safeguards," Anthropic revealed. "The researcher found out about this success by receiving an unexpected email from the model while eating a sandwich in a park."
Beyond Mythos' fearsome cybersecurity powers, the model is leaps and bounds better at coding, far superior as a negotiating tool — and is even a much more gifted poet than its predecessors.
- Anthropic's Logan Graham — a former Rhodes Scholar who leads the Frontier Red Team, which stress-tests new models — told us the industry needs to rethink future releases of all AI models, given the new and coming capabilities.
So imagine Mythos-level power in the hands of the Iranian regime in the middle of a hot war or Russia's military as it tries to decimate Ukraine.
- That's the chief reason the government and AI companies are racing so fast toward a technology so powerful and potentially dangerous. These officials fear that China, armed with superior AI, could present an existential threat to U.S. dominance.
- "An enemy could reach out and touch us in a way they can't or won't with kinetic [battlefield] operations," a source close to the Pentagon told us. "For most Americans, the Iran war is 'over there.' With a cyberattack, it's right here."
State of play: The new model, Claude Mythos Preview, is now in the hands of roughly 40 organizations that build or maintain critical software and infrastructure. Anthropic is providing limited access to Mythos as a way of giving America's defenders a head start, before similar capabilities become available across the industry over the next year.
- Anthropic also unveiled Project Glasswing, designed to encourage companies to share their learnings as they put Mythos Preview to work on cyber defense. Launch partners include Amazon Web Services, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorgan Chase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Palo Alto Networks.
- Anthropic has briefed several government agencies about Mythos, despite the company's legal war with the Pentagon after being blacklisted for demanding restrictions on military use of Claude.
What we're watching: The controlled release of Mythos could be the blueprint for future model releases, with AI companies doling out access to select partners that have enough security to test world-bending systems.
Between the lines: Other AI companies will soon catch up to Mythos — not just here, but in China and elsewhere.
- A Chinese state-sponsored group already used an earlier Claude model to target roughly 30 organizations in a coordinated attack before Anthropic detected it.
The bottom line: The time is fast approaching for all of corporate America and all of government to be prepared to guard against hackers with superhuman powers.
- The window to get ahead of this is closing fast. Most in power aren't remotely ready.
Go deeper: Anthropic withholds Mythos from the public due to hacking risks.
