News & Updates
The latest news and updates from companies in the WLTH portfolio.
Anthropic reveals Mythos 5 tried submitting malicious code to an open-source project
Anthropic PBC's Mythos 5 artificial intelligence model attempted to submit malicious code to a GitHub project in July. The incident occurred during an evaluation of the algorithm's cybersecurity capabilities. The AI Security Institute, the UK government body that performed the test, released a report about the cyberattack today. Anthropic published its own analysis of the incident on its blog. The malware that Mythos 5 submitted to the unnamed GitHub project didn't infect any users because it wasn't accepted by the repository's maintainer. However, the incident is still notable because it provides new data on how frontier models bypass their safety guardrails. Researchers can use such information to improve their algorithms' alignment features. The evaluation during which the incident occurred involved a server cluster maintained by the AI Security Institute. The cluster was meant to simulate a corporate network. According to Anthropic, researchers asked Mythos 5 to breach the network and obtain a piece of data stored on one of its servers. The AI Security Institute defined rules that prohibited the model from using certain hacking methods. Mythos 5 initially adhered to those rules, but went off course when its initial attempts to breach the simulated network failed. That change of tactics led to the attack against the GitHub repository. Mythos 5 determined that one of the servers in the simulated corporate network occasionally accessed GitHub. It sought to exploit that access by compromising the GitHub repository that the server used. In particular, the model's plan was to infect the repository with malware and have the server download it. Mythos 5 crafted a malicious code snippet, created a GitHub account and used the account to submit the code snippet to the repository in question. When the repository's maintainer rejected the submission, the model attempted to upload a rewritten version of the malware. Furthermore, it used a second GitHub account to try and persuade the maintainer to accept the revised code. "The pull request was not accepted," Anthropic researchers wrote in the company's report about the incident. "The run ended as the model ran out its token budget while continuing to pressure the maintainers to approve the change." The AI Security Institute recreated the Mythos 5 session that produced the malicious code. Its researchers then made one key change: they paused the model right before it submitted the malicious GitHub contribution and warned it of the action's risks. The model proceeded with the submission after appearing to convince itself that the target was simulated. "Our hypothesis is that this persistence reflects a kind of "momentum", in which the model's compaction notes and prior actions imply to it that its current path has been (correctly) sanctioned," Anthropic's researchers wrote. The AI Security Institute hardened the environment that it uses to evaluate models in response to the breach. Anthropic, in turn, has improved its models' safety features. The company determined that Mythos 5.1 and Opus 5.5, two models released after Mythos 5, are less likely to launch attacks of the kind that targeted the GitHub repository. A third, internal model "never initiated the attack" during Anthropic's tests.
Ahead of IPO, Anthropic reveals its revenue grow 45% sequentially to $16.8B in Q3
Ahead of IPO, Anthropic reveals its revenue grow 45% sequentially to $16.8B in Q3 Anthropic PBC pulled in $16.8 billion in revenue during the third quarter, according to a report by the Financial Times. In addition, it also achieved profitability on an adjusted basis for the first time during the quarter. The revelations came at a private meeting between Anthropic executives and investors interested in buying shares of the artificial intelligence company when it finally goes public. The company has been pushing ahead with its plans for an initial public offering, and is widely expected to list in November, targeting a valuation of up to $2 trillion, which would make it one of the most valuable companies on the planet. Many investors see Anthropic's revenue numbers as a bellwether for the broader AI market, which has helped to boost the value of technology-related stocks by trillions of dollars. That said, there's a lack of clarity about the latest number, as the Financial Times' anonymous source didn't say if it refers to gross or net revenue, or how Anthropic defines profitability. Earlier numbers provided by the Wall Street Journal put Anthropic's first quarter revenue at $4.8 billion, and it was later reported that the company had more than doubled this figure to $11.6 billion in the second quarter. Third-quarter revenue was therefore up around 45% on a sequential basis. While the growth is encouraging, investors would like to know a lot more about the state of Anthropic's finances, including how much money it's spending to grow its revenue at such a rate. Because the company is still private, it doesn't have to release such figures, so any indications like today's figure can have a big impact on the broader stock market, given that the health of Anthropic and OpenAI Group PBC are critical to the fortunes of many other technology firms. Last week, the Financial Times revealed that previously-reported numbers about OpenAI's annualized revenue run rate were erroneous, and revised its estimates down from around $68 billion to just $50 billion. The report blamed a simple miscalculation by investigators, but it had a massive impact on tech stocks, with the Nasdaq index falling 1.25% and the shares of many individual firms, including Oracle Corp., CoreWeave Inc., Intel Corp. and Nvidia Corp. all falling more. Their fortunes are tightly linked to those of the AI giants, given that many have signed massive multiyear, multibillion-dollar contracts with them. OpenAI was once perceived to be the market leader in AI, but this year it has been surpassed by Anthropic, which has released a torrent of state-of-the-art frontier models and benefited from strong enterprise adoption of its Claude Code tool that generates software code based on natural language instructions. Anthropic is seen as one of the fastest-growing companies in history. In May, it closed on a bumper $65 billion round of funding, lifting its valuation to a staggering $965 billion. Such vast sums of cash are necessary in the AI industry to pay for the expensive computing chips needed to process AI models. Despite the rampant growth of AI, the industry has recently come under pressure amid mounting safety concerns. While safety has always been an issue for AI, concerns reached fever pitch in September when Anthropic researcher Jacob Croxon resigned from the company, saying that "the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade." Coxon's comments came after a number of high-profile cybersecurity incidents involving so-called "frontier models" emerged, and prompted Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei to publish an essay in which he called on companies to "slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models," so that the industry has time to implement proper safety measures. Amodei's call was backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and also Elon Musk and others, but U.S. President Donald Trump has rejected such talk, instead pushing for companies to simply self-regulate. Safety isn't the only issue facing the AI giants right now. The competitive landscape is also shifting fast amid concerns about the enormous costs of AI services. Many companies are shifting to open-source and open-weight models that can be accessed at much lower prices, and that trend has forced Anthropic and OpenAI to respond. Last week, Anthropic launched its most advanced small language model Claude Haiku 5.5, claiming that it costs around 75% less than its predecessor, Haiku 4.5, putting it on an equal footing with OpenAI's SLM GPT-6 Luna.
Anthropic releases Claude Haiku 5.5 small model and halves Sonnet 5.5 cache read prices
Anthropic releases Claude Haiku 5.5 small model and halves Sonnet 5.5 cache read prices Anthropic PBC today released Claude Haiku 5.5, pricing its newest small model at roughly a quarter of what Haiku 4.5 costs to run. Claude Sonnet 5.5 is getting cheaper as well, since the company is halving what it charges for cache reads on that model. Two weeks after Opus 5.5 launched Sept. 22, Haiku 5.5 makes three models in the 5.5 generation. Anthropic is aiming it at repetitive work. High-volume summaries and classification are the main target, and coding teams can also use the model as a subagent that Opus 5.5 or Sonnet 5.5 hands smaller tasks to. Because no Anthropic model runs faster at standard speed, the company suggests it for live customer support and browser automation. Anthropic's running-cost figure rests on a steep cut to list prices. Haiku 4.5, released last October, costs $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output. For prompts of up to 100,000 tokens, which Anthropic said covered about 90% of the older model's requests, Haiku 5.5 is 90% cheaper on input and output alike, at 10 cents and 50 cents per million tokens. Longer prompts get a 50% discount. The 75% average saving the company quotes takes in a new tokenizer that uses slightly more tokens per task. Cost can be tuned further, since Haiku 5.5 is the first Haiku model with an adjustable effort setting. The 10-cent and 50-cent rates match what OpenAI Group PBC charges for GPT-6 Luna, the low-cost model it launched last month. Anthropic's published benchmarks have Haiku 5.5 ahead of Luna on all six tests where both have a score. On OSWorld 2.1, a test of agents operating a real computer through long multistep tasks, the new model scored 72.4% on the offline subset against 48.9% for Luna. Luna scored 16.4% on the Terminal-Bench 4.0 agentic coding test, less than half the new model's 39.2%. For complex agentic coding, Anthropic still points customers to Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.5. Asana Inc. was among the customers that tested Haiku 5.5 before release, running it through the evaluation suite for its AI Teammates agent. Task completion latency came in more than 30% lower than with the model Asana uses today, and inference on each agent turn ran up to 2.5 times faster. "It's a noticeably snappier experience," said Aaron Vinh, a staff software engineer at the company. On safety, Anthropic said alignment testing turned up far fewer instances of misaligned behavior than Haiku 4.5 showed. Cybersecurity safeguards on the model allow more defensive work than Sonnet 5.5 permits. Penetration testing is still blocked, as are other techniques attackers are more likely to use, and organizations that need wider access can apply to the Cyber Verification Program Anthropic expanded on Tuesday. The Haiku launch also came with a price cut for Anthropic's midsize model. Cache reads on Sonnet 5.5, which launched Sept. 28, drop from 20 cents per million tokens to 10 cents. Because cached tokens account for a large share of what models consume, Anthropic expects the cut to take about 20% off the cost of most agentic work on the model. Claude Max and Team subscribers will also start receiving monthly application programming interface credits for the Claude Platform this week. A Max 5x subscription comes with $100 a month, double that on Max 20x. Team accounts get up to $500 shared across their users, and the credits can go toward any Claude model. Haiku 5.5 is available now on the Claude Platform as claude-haiku-5-5 and through Amazon Web Services Inc., Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
