China has spent the past year telling the world that AI should be open, cheap and shared. In private, its officials are unnerved by one American model that is none of those things.
Beijing is growing anxious that Anthropic’s Mythos could be turned against it, Bloomberg reported. Officials see the frontier model as a potential offensive cyber weapon, people familiar with the matter said, and they resent that Anthropic denies China access even for ordinary use.
The fear is not abstract. Mythos has proved unusually good at breaking software, finding and exploiting flaws at a scale humans cannot match. One GovTech assessment found it chained hundreds of vulnerabilities together and wrote working exploit code on its first attempt. That worked more than 83% of the time. In June, Washington judged the risk severe enough to cut off foreign access entirely.
The irony is hard to miss. China is the loudest champion of open AI, flooding the world with downloadable models and casting itself as the technology’s democratiser. Yet the system it fears most is a closed American one it cannot legally touch.
A grievance with a summit attached
