Anthropic said this week that the debut of its new Claude Mythos Preview model marks a critical juncture in the evolution of cybersecurity, representing an unprecedented existential threat to existing software defense strategies. So, is it more AI hype—or a true turning point?
According to Anthropic, Mythos Preview crosses a threshold of capabilities to discover vulnerabilities in virtually any and every operating system, browser, or other software product and autonomously develop working exploits for hacking. With this in mind, the company is only releasing the new model to a few dozen organizations for now—including Microsoft, Apple, Google, and the Linux Foundation—as part of a consortium dubbed Project Glasswing. But after years of speculation about how generative AI could impact cybersecurity, the news this week ignited controversy about whether a reckoning has really arrived and what it might look like in practice.
Some are extremely skeptical of Anthropic’s claims. They argue that existing AI agents can already help users find and exploit vulnerabilities much more easily and cheaply than ever before, and that this reality is fueling refinements in how companies discover and patch their software without fundamentally changing the paradigm. And then there’s the ick factor that Anthropic will almost certainly benefit financially from positioning its latest model as mysterious, uniquely powerful, and exclusive. Other researchers and practitioners, though, say that they agree with Anthropic’s assessment and point out that the company has said Mythos Preview is just the first to achieve capabilities that will ultimately be widely available in other models.
“I typically am very skeptical of these things, and the open source community tends to be very skeptical, but I do fundamentally feel like this is a real threat,” says Alex Zenla, chief technology officer of cloud security firm Edera.
Zenla and others specifically point to one Mythos Preview capability as the pivot point. Generative AI, they say, is now getting more capable at identifying and developing what are known as “exploit chains,” or groups of vulnerabilities that can be exploited in sequence to deeply compromise a target—essentially Rube Goldberg–machine-style hacking. Many of the most sophisticated hacking techniques employ exploit chains, including so called zero-click attacks that compromise a system without requiring any interaction from a user.
“We are already living in the world where companies run vulnerable software, vulnerable hardware, and struggle to patch. Many companies are not capable of securing their infrastructure—that hasn’t really changed from yesterday to today,” says longtime security engineer and researcher Niels Provos. “But from what I understand, Mythos is really good at coming up with multistage vulnerabilities, and then also provides the proof of exploitation. I don’t think it intrinsically changes the problem space, but it changes the required skill level to find these vulnerabilities and exploit them.”
A limited release of Mythos Preview to Project Glasswing participants only gives defenders a small lead time to find weaknesses in their own systems using the model and start to grapple more broadly with how software development, update cycles, and patch adoption needs to change before attackers have widespread access to such capabilities themselves.
Industry leaders seem to be heeding the warning. Anthropic’s frontier red team lead, Logan Graham, told WIRED on Tuesday that as the company reached out to organizations about Project Glasswing ahead of this week’s announcement, the phone calls got shorter and shorter because the potential threat was becoming more obvious.
“This is an issue that involves all of the model developers. Our goal here is just to kick things off,” Graham said. “It’s really important that Mythos Preview gets in the hands of defenders to give a head start.”
