Anthropic's Claude Mythos AI has discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in every OS and browser

Anthropic's unreleased Claude Mythos is described as a "general-purpose, unreleased frontier model," but its coding capabilities are so powerful that it poses a real and unprecedented cybersecurity threat. According to the AI company, the Mythos Preview has already "found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities" in every major operating system and web browser.

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Its coding capabilities are so strong that, apparently, only the "most skilled humans" could beat it at finding and exploiting these vulnerabilities. "Given the rate of AI progress, it will not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who are committed to deploying them safely," Anthropic explains. "The fallout - for economies, public safety, and national security - could be severe."

And with that, Claude Mythos won't be getting a public release anytime soon, but it's currently being deployed as part of the new Project Glasswing initiative designed to "secure the world's most critical software."

This means Anthropic's partners at Amazon Web Services, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorgan Chase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Palo Alto Networks will "use Mythos Preview as part of their defensive security work."

The company adds that it will eventually share its findings with the wider security industry and is already opening up access to additional organizations that build or maintain "critical software infrastructure." To highlight the urgency and seriousness of the situation and the real threat posed by AI models and AI-powered hackers, Anthropic has confirmed that Mythos Preview has identified a 27-year-old vulnerability in OpenBSD, a 16-year-old vulnerability in FFmpeg, and several vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel.

The good news is that the company has reported these vulnerabilities, and they've been patched. However, when you're talking about thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, it underscores the importance of responsible, safe AI deployment and the potential need for regulation. That said, it's good to see Anthropic using its AI powers for good, so to speak.

"The dangers of getting this wrong are obvious," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in a post on X. "But if we get it right, there is a real opportunity to create a fundamentally more secure internet and world than we had before the advent of AI-powered cyber capabilities."