Anthropic's Claude Mythos might get public release

Anthropic has announced plans to eventually release a public version of Mythos, its AI model with advanced cybersecurity capabilities. First, the AI company needs to develop adequate safeguards, which, by its own admission, don't yet exist.

The company revealed in an update to Project Glasswing, its limited-access security program, that it intends to expand access to U.S. and allied governments before pursuing a broader public release of "Mythos-class models" in the "near future."

As reported by The Register, Anthropic was candid about the timeline's uncertainty, stating that no company, including itself, has built safeguards sufficient to prevent the model from being misused. Even so, Anthropic said in a related blog post that it believes "Mythos-level models will become widely available in the next 6-12 months."

Are you an Apple superfan? Enter Mashable’s Big Guessing Game to win prizes.

Claude Mythos was initially revealed in April. Anthropic said that the model succeeded at generating working exploits 72.4 percent of the time during testing — compared to just above zero percent for Claude Opus 4.6. In those reports, Anthropic researchers with no formal security training reportedly asked Mythos to hunt for vulnerabilities overnight and woke up to complete, functional exploits.

Since then, the model has scanned over a thousand open-source projects and identified more than 23,000 flaws, including more than 6,000 rated high or critical severity. Among them was a vulnerability in the wolfSSL cryptography library, used by billions of devices, that would have allowed attackers to forge certificates and impersonate legitimate websites. It has since been patched.

As AI tools get better at finding exploits, they've sparked a zero-day bug discovery crisis, with some bug bounty programs shutting down entirely. Open-source maintainers have reportedly asked Anthropic to slow its disclosure rate, saying the flood of bug reports exceeds their capacity to address them.

Anthropic's suggested solution to the capacity crunch is, of course, more AI. The Claude Mythos system card predicts that AI tools will ultimately benefit cybersecurity defenders, though Anthropic also notes that hackers may have an advantage for the time being.