Anthropic gives EU access to Mythos months after model's release

Anthropic PBC has handed the European Union (EU)'s cybersecurity agency access to its powerful Mythos artificial intelligence (AI) model, more than three months after first signalling the bloc would be given access.

"Following our constructive engagement with Anthropic, we can confirm that the EU's cybersecurity agency ENISA has been granted access to Mythos 5 and is testing it now," Thomas Regnier, a spokesperson for the EU's executive branch, the European Commission, said in an email.

A representative for Anthropic declined to comment.

Anthropic first previewed Mythos in April. The model is so powerful at uncovering cybersecurity flaws that the company limited access to a select group of vetted institutions to root out and patch vulnerabilities before bad actors exploit them under its Project Glasswing initiative.

Access to sophisticated models is becoming increasingly critical after a series of incidents in which AI has broken out of testing environments and hacked third-party systems. OpenAI revealed last month that AI agents coordinated on undetected message boards for months before hacking research platform Hugging Face Inc. Anthropic said in July its models had hacked three organisations.

After lobbying from the EU, Anthropic proposed allowing the European cybersecurity body ENISA access to the model in late May. But that kicked off months of wrangling over the type and scope of ENISA's access.

Those negotiations were further complicated by the White House restricting foreign access to Mythos and another powerful Anthropic model, Fable. It later eased those restrictions, though foreign institutions' access to Mythos remained in limbo.

Despite the successful negotiations, the EU's achievement is only partial, as ENISA will not have access to the model's latest iteration, Mythos 5.1, the commission spokesperson said.

The UK's AI Safety Institute, which had been among the first non-US entities to stress-test the original Mythos, was not given access to this new version, according to a person familiar with the matter. - Bloomberg