Uninvited Users Access Anthropic's Mythos AI Model | PYMNTS.com

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That's according to a report Wednesday (April 22) by Bloomberg News, which notes that the company has described Mythos as powerful enough to initiate serious cyberattacks.

The report cites a source familiar with the situation, who said a small number of users in a private online forum gained access to Mythos just as Anthropic was announcing plans to release the model to a handful of companies for testing.

Since then, this group has continued to use Mythos, but not for cybersecurity reasons, the source said, backing their statement with screenshots and a live demonstration of the model.

PYMNTS has reached out to Anthropic for comment but has not yet gotten a reply.

Anthropic, the Bloomberg report continued, has said Mythos can spot and exploit vulnerabilities "in every major operating system and every major web browser when directed by a user to do so."

With that in mind, the company has been cautious about releasing the model, giving it to a small group of software companies as part of a program known as Project Glasswing. The goal is to allow those companies to test and safeguard their own systems from possible cyberthreats.

Bloomberg argues the unpermitted access to Mythos underscores the challenge facing Anthropic in preventing potentially dangerous tech from making its way beyond the company's approved partners.

Mythos has sparked cybersecurity concerns among regulators around the world, including from a group of central banks in the Asia-Pacific region earlier this week, following similar warnings in Europe, Great Britain and the U.S.

As PYMNTS wrote last week, statements like these demonstrate the "split-screen reality" around Anthropic following Mythos' release.

"The company is gaining traction fast in the enterprise market even as regulators and banks scramble to understand the risks that come with more powerful AI tools," that report said.

In a separate report, PYMNTS wrote about a recent evaluation of Mythos by the U.K. Government's AI Security Institute (AISI).

The most important takeaway from those findings, the report said, is not that AI can already carry out flawless cyberattacks. In fact, the AISI report noted that the success rate is limited.

"But systems that can plan and execute multistage intrusions, even inconsistently, represent a baseline that will improve," PYMNTS added.

"More compute, better orchestration, and tighter integration with external tools will incrementally close the gap between partial and reliable capability."