Anthropic's magic code-sniffer: More Swiss cheese than cheddar, for now
AI vuln-hunter finds what humans taught it to find. Funny that
OPINION In retrospect, calling it Mythos made it a hostage to fortune. Anthropic may have hoped that the name implied its AI code security model had mythical god-like powers, but there's an alternate reading. Another definition for Mythos is a set of beliefs of obscure origin which are incompatible with reality.
That reality is trickling in, and it’s looking less mythical, more typical. Mythos is a great tool that can automate a lot of the things expert humans do, and it’s the expert humans who get the most from it. It is very good at finding classes of vulnerability that humans know about, while not finding ones that they don’t. Training, amirite? Project Glasswing, limiting early use to trusted partners with a real need, is probably a responsible approach to using its powers for good, but other unrestricted models are quite good at this too. Some hype, some truth, LLMs gonna LLM.
It is cynical to say the only real innovation is an AI company operating ethically. Equally cynical is seeing the closed roll-out and the attendant publicity as merely an exercise in hype. It is more constructive, arguably more accurate, and certainly more exciting, to take all this as an early glimpse of a better future. One where the threat landscape stops being a function of geological and climactic forces we can’t control, turning instead into one cultivated, controlled and gratifyingly anti-climactic.
