Anthropic’s Mythos AI Reportedly Hacked the NSA’s Most Sensitive Systems ‘in Hours’

When Anthropic first disclosed Mythos in April, it sent an anxious shockwave through much of the cybersecurity sector. The new AI model was allegedly so ruthlessly effective at finding and exploiting security vulnerabilities in existing software that the company said it was holding off on a public release and would only grant access to a small group of early testers, including the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Another wave of fear reverberated this week after the NSA reportedly discovered multiple vulnerabilities within its own cybersecurity systems during its tests with Mythos. If that agency—which supposedly boasts the most impenetrable cyberdefenses in the world—can be hacked by Mythos, what hope does the rest of the world’s cybersecurity infrastructure have? This latest round of panic began with what seems to have been something of a game of telephone: Someone says one thing, which gets repeated by another, and another after that, and along that chain of communication, the original statement is distorted. Last week, The Economist reported that during a June 11 hearing before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Vi