Latest Anthropic AI model finds cracks in software defences

NEW YORK: Anthropic on Tuesday said its yet-to-be-released artificial intelligence model called Claude Mythos has proven keenly adept at exposing software weaknesses.

Mythos has laid bare thousands of vulnerabilities in commonly used applications for which no patch or fix exists, prompting the San Francisco-based AI startup to form an alliance with cybersecurity specialists to bolster defenses against hacking.

"We have a new model that we're explicitly not releasing to the public," Mike Krieger of Anthropic Labs said at a HumanX AI conference in San Francisco.

Instead, Anthropic is letting cybersecurity specialists and engineers in the open-source community work with Mythos to use the model as a defensive weapon "sort of arming them ahead of time," Krieger explained.

Leaps in AI model capabilities have come with concerns about hackers using such tools for figuring out passwords or cracking encryption meant to keep data safe.

The oldest of the vulnerabilities uncovered by Mythos dates back 27 years, and none were ostensibly noticed by their makers before being pinpointed by the AI model, according to Anthropic.

Mythos is the latest generation of Anthropic's Claude family of AI, and a recent leak of some of its code prompted the startup to release a blog post warning it posed unprecedented cybersecurity risks.

"AI models have reached a level of coding capability where they can surpass all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities," Anthropic said in a blog post.

"The fallout -- for economies, public safety, and national security -- could be severe."

Software vulnerabilities exposed by Mythos were often subtle and difficult to detect without AI, according to Anthropic.

As an example, it said Mythos found a previously unnoticed flaw in video software that had been tested more than 5 million times by its creators.