Anthropic’s Claude Mythos AI is said to be frighteningly capable, but we shouldn’t get carried away by the hype
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, the Guardian’s US tech editor, writing to you from my happy village in Pokopia.
Artificial intelligence companies make powerful products. They also make outlandish claims.
Last week, Anthropic released Claude Mythos, an AI model focused on cybersecurity, which has inspired widespread thrill and panic over how capable it is said to be. There’s a catch, though: the public can’t touch it. OpenAI declared at the end of last week that it, too, had developed a frighteningly capable cybersecurity AI.
Anthropic called Mythos a “reckoning” for the cybersecurity industry because of how keenly adept at exposing software weaknesses the new tool had proven. According to Anthropic, Mythos has laid bare thousands of vulnerabilities in commonly used applications for which no patch or fix exists, prompting the startup to form an alliance with cybersecurity specialists, nicknamed Project Glasswing, to bolster defenses against hacking and withhold the model from wide distribution, much like an arthouse film that plays solely in Los Angeles and New York.
