Back in April, Anthropic became concerned about the release of it’s next AI model known as Mythos. According to reports at the time, experts asked to look at it found it was so powerful at finding exploits buried in software that it would be a potential goldmine for hackers up to no good.
One balmy February evening in Bali, Nicholas Carlini stepped away between events at a wedding, opened his laptop, and set out to do some damage. Anthropic PBC had just made a new artificial intelligence model, called Mythos, available for internal review, and Carlini — a well-known AI researcher — intended to see what kind of trouble it could cause…
Within hours Carlini found numerous techniques to infiltrate systems used around the world. Once Carlini was back in Anthropic’s downtown San Francisco office, he discovered Mythos was able to autonomously create powerful break-in tools, including against Linux, the open-source code that underpins most of modern computing.
Rather than spring this on an unsuspecting world, Anthropic decided to do a pre-release to trusted partners, giving them a chance to patch their code before some hacker could take advantage of it.
Anthropic gave 12 tech companies access via Project Glasswing, which it described as “an effort to secure the world’s most critical software”.
They include cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services, device manufacturers Apple, Microsoft and Google, and chip-makers Nvidia and Broadcom.
Finally, earlier this month, the company announced the new products would be available to subscribers.
Anthropic on Tuesday announced Claude Fable 5, a Mythos-class model that will be available to its enterprise customers and paid subscribers. The company said the broad release is possible because of new safeguards that block responses in specific high-risk areas, including cybersecurity and biology.
But that’s when things took a surprising turn. Just a few days after Anthropic announced the release, they got an order from the Trump administration telling them not to allow the model to be used by any foreign nationals, here or abroad. Rather than try to sort that out and risk failing, Anthropic just shut access to the new models.
The company said it received an order at 5:21 p.m. ET, instructing it to suspend all access to the models “by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.”
Anthropic abruptly disabled the models for all of its customers in order to ensure compliance, but said all of its other models will not be affected…
In its statement on Friday, Anthropic said the government did not provide specific details about its national security concern. The company apologized to its customers for the disruption.
What led to the decision to suddenly place export controls on the model? According to some reports, the CEO of Amazon warned the Trump administration that their team had found ways to bypass the security built into the model.
There was also a report that in testing by the NSA, Mythos was living up to they hype:
This month, Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said NSA Director Gen. Joshua Rudd had told him that Mythos “broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours.” The comment, later cited in a report by The Economist, set off a wave of online speculation that the latest AI systems were already far more disruptive to cybersecurity than previously understood.
The Economist’s defense editor later posted on X that a U.S. official told him Warner had misunderstood Rudd’s comments and that the specific Mythos work was part of a red-teaming effort to test the security of internal networks. Red-teaming efforts are controlled security exercises in which authorized testers try to break into or stress-test systems so an organization can find and fix weaknesses before real attackers exploit them.
In any case, the model has remained shut down for just over two weeks as the company tried to convince the Trump administration that releasing it was safe. And today it seems they’ve succeeded.
The Trump administration and Anthropic have reached an agreement to restore access to the company’s most recent general-access artificial-intelligence model, resolving a fight that showed how the White House is intervening to address security concerns in the fast-growing industry.
Under a deal announced Tuesday evening, Anthropic would address the workarounds that researchers at Amazon used to evade the safeguards for Fable, a public version of Anthropic’s powerful Mythos model that is capable of carrying out cyberattacks, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on X. The guardrails are critical for the company to release the model publicly.
“Over the past two weeks, we have worked closely with Anthropic to analyze and approve Fable 5 to ensure alignment across the U.S. government and strengthen America’s leadership in AI,” Lutnick said.
The “Five Eyes” released a statement last week warning that cyber security could be changing very fast in the modern world. Here’s a bit of what they said.
Frontier Al models are anticipated to exceed current industry expectations, fundamentally transforming both offensive and defensive cyber capabilities. The timeline is not years, it is months…
The rapid pace of frontier AI development means cyber risk assumptions can become outdated in months, not years. We must act before and be prepared to adapt and withstand evolving threats.
Cyber resilience is not an IT issue – it is central to operational continuity and market trust. Leaders who act now will reduce exposure, strengthen resilience, and build confidence with customers, partners, and investors. Those who delay will face growing and avoidable risk.
So the models are back out there and, no doubt, China is already working on ways to reverse engineer them to create their own version of Mythos. And you can bet their interest in it will be as a new way to attack western countries, especially the U.S.
China sees itself as involved in civilizational struggle with the U.S. They are already making constant efforts to hack into our secure spaces and steal valuable information from companies and academia. AI just makes it easier for them. The U.S. needs to get ready for more major cyber attacks from China before the end of this year.
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