Anthropic locked down its most powerful AI Model over cybersecurity fears–then put it to work

Anthropic’s most succesful AI mannequin has already discovered hundreds of AI cybersecurity vulnerabilities throughout each main working system and net browser. The firm’s response was not to launch it, however to quietly hand it to the organisations accountable for retaining the web working.

That mannequin is Claude Mythos Preview, and the initiative is known as Project Glasswing.

The launch companions embrace Amazon Web Services, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorganChase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Palo Alto Networks. 

Beyond that core group, Anthropic has prolonged entry to over 40 extra organisations that construct or keep essential software program infrastructure. Anthropic is committing up to US$100 million in utilization credit for Mythos Preview throughout the hassle, 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 skilled for cybersecurity work. Anthropic mentioned 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 principally saturates present safety benchmarks, forcing Anthropic to shift its focus to novel real-world duties–particularly, zero-day vulnerabilities. These flaws had been beforehand unknown to the software program’s builders. 

Among the findings: a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD, an working system identified for its sturdy 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 consumer wherever on the web to acquire full management of a server working NFS. No human was concerned within the discovery or exploitation after the preliminary immediate to discover the bug. 

Nicholas Carlini from Anthropic’s analysis crew 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 provide you with 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 typically accessible due to its cybersecurity capabilities,” Newton Cheng, Frontier Red Team Cyber Lead at Anthropic, mentioned. “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–could possibly be extreme.” 

This is just not hypothetical. Anthropic had beforehand disclosed what it described as the primary documented case of a cyberattack largely executed by AI–a Chinese state-sponsored group that used AI brokers to autonomously infiltrate roughly 30 world targets, with AI dealing with the vast majority of tactical operations independently. 

The firm has additionally privately briefed senior US authorities officers on Mythos Preview’s full capabilities. The intelligence neighborhood is now actively weighing how the mannequin might reshape each offensive and defensive hacking operations. 

The open-source downside

One dimension of Project Glasswing that goes past the headline coalition: open-source software program. Jim Zemlin, CEO of the Linux Foundation, put it plainly: “In the previous, safety experience has been a luxurious reserved for organisations with giant safety groups. Open-source maintainers, whose software program underpins a lot of the world’s essential infrastructure, have traditionally been left to work out safety on their very own.”

Anthropic has donated US$2.5 million to Alpha-Omega and OpenSSF by the Linux Foundation, and US$1.5 million to the Apache Software Foundation–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 firm 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 degree of threat as Mythos Preview. 

The aggressive image is already shifting round it. When OpenAI launched GPT-5.3-Codex in February, the corporate known as it the primary mannequin it had categorised 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 customary for fashions at this functionality degree.

Whether that customary holds as these capabilities unfold additional is, at this level, an open query that no single initiative can reply.

See Also: Anthropic’s refusal to arm AI is exactly why the UK wants it

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