By Robert McMillan
Anthropic is taking steps to arm some of the world's biggest technology companies with tools to find and patch bugs in their hardware and software.
The company is making a preview model of its new AI model, called Mythos, available to about 50 companies and organizations that maintain critical infrastructure, including Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco and the Linux Foundation.
Cybersecurity researchers and software-makers worry that artificial intelligence is becoming so good at exploiting vulnerabilities that it could cause widespread online disruption. Security experts have predicted that AI models will discover an avalanche of software bugs, and the effort is set to help companies stay one step ahead of cyber criminals and other threats.
Mythos has proved to be so capable at potentially dangerous things such as finding and exploiting software bugs that Anthropic has, at present, no plans to release it to the general public, said Logan Graham, the head of Anthropic's Frontier Red Team, which evaluates Claude for risks. "We need to know that we can release it safely, and it's not exactly clear how we can do that with full confidence," he said.
Over the past six months, cybersecurity researchers have become increasingly worried that AI systems are not only becoming better at finding bugs, but that they are also shrinking the window of time between when a bug is disclosed and when it can be exploited with working attack software.
Late last year, researchers at Stanford University found that AI software was almost as good as humans at finding and exploiting bugs on a real-world network.
And earlier this year Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 model found more high-severity bugs in the Firefox browser in two weeks than the rest of the world typically reports in two months.
When measuring dollar cost to find a bug, Mythos is about 10 times as efficient as previous AI models, Graham said. Details of Mythos's capabilities were previously reported by Fortune.
While Anthropic has no immediate plans to release Mythos, other models will likely match its bug-finding capabilities within the next few years, Graham said.
"We basically need to start, right now, preparing for a world where there is zero lag between discovery and exploitation," he said.
Write to Robert McMillan at robert.mcmillan@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 07, 2026 14:00 ET (18:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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