Anthropic postponing the release of its new artificial intelligence (AI) model, Claude Mythos, said to be so skilled at coding it could be a wicked weapon for hackers, has encountered a mix of alarm and skepticism.
The company is among several contenders in a fierce AI race. Promoting the awe of Anthropic’s own technology boosts business and enhances its allure in the event it soon goes public, as is rumored.
“The world has no choice but to take the cyberthreat associated with Mythos seriously,” said David Sacks, an entrepreneur and investor who heads US President Donald Trump’s council of advisers on technology.
Photo: Bloomberg
“But it’s hard to ignore that Anthropic has a history of scare tactics,” Sacks said.
Mythos has sparked fears of hackers commanding armies of AI agents able to break through computer defenses with ease.
At this week’s HumanX AI conference in San Francisco, Alex Stamos of start-up Corridor, which addresses AI safety, acknowledged a real threat from agentic hackers.
Stamos quipped about what he referred to as Anthropic’s “marketing schtick.”
“They have these adorable cutesy cartoons about these products that are so incredibly dangerous that they won’t even let people use them,” Stamos said of the San Francisco-based start-up. “It’s like if the Manhattan Project announced the nuclear bomb within a cute little Calvin and Hobbes cartoon.”
The heads of the US’ biggest banks met this week with US Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent to weigh the security implications of the yet-to-be released Claude Mythos, reports said on Friday.
“Mythos model points to something far more consequential than another leap in artificial intelligence,” Cato Networks cofounder and chief executive Shlomo Kramer said in a blog post.
“It signals a shift that could redefine the balance between attackers and defenders in cyberspace,” Kramer said.
A tightly restricted preview of Mythos was shared with partner organizations this week, under an initiative called Project Glasswing. They include Amazon.com Inc, Apple Inc, Microsoft Corp, Google, Cisco Systems Inc, CrowdStrike Inc and JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Mythos can autonomously scan vast amounts of code to find and chain together previously unknown security vulnerabilities in all kinds of software, from operating systems to Web browsers, Anthropic and partners said.
Crucially this can be done at a speed and scale no human could match, meaning it could be used to bring down banks, hospitals or national infrastructure within hours, the said.
“What once required elite specialists can now be performed by software agents,” Kramer said.
“The immediate consequences will be a surge in vulnerability discovery, a true tsunami” of exploiting known and unknown vulnerabilities, he added.
At HumanX, the apparent consensus was that it makes sense that AI agents already adept at coding would excel at finding weaknesses in software.
“We’re not in an era where human beings can write code when we have superhuman [AI models] that are then going to find bugs in it,” Stamos said. “It’s just not possible.”
He said the coming dynamic would involve humans supervising AI agents to protect networks against hackers using that same technology to attack.
Stamos referred to it as “agent-to-agent war,” with humans on the sidelines giving advice.
Palo Alto Networks chief security intelligence officer Wendy Whitmore said she expects “some sort of catastrophic attack” this year connected to AI agent capabilities.
“The thing that keeps me up at night is that we’re staring down the barrel of a massive influx of new vulnerabilities that are going to be found by AI,” CrowdStrike senior vice president Adam Meyers said.
Meyers said he saw embedding a tiny AI model directly into malicious code infecting networks as a natural tactic to be explored by hackers.
“The ultimate weapon would be malware that has no preprogramming,” Meyers said. “It can do whatever you ask it to.”
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