By Robert McMillan
Security researchers say they have discovered a new way of circumventing Apple's state-of-the art security technology, using techniques they discovered while testing an early version of Anthropic's Mythos AI software in April.
The researchers with Calif, a Palo Alto-based security research company, say the software they wrote links together two bugs and a handful of techniques to corrupt the Mac's memory and then gain access to parts of the device that should be inaccessible.
It is what's known as a privilege escalation exploit, and if it were chained together with other attacks it could be used by a hacker to seize control of the computer.
The technique is noteworthy because Apple has put so much effort into locking down MacOS, said Micha Zalewski, a security researcher who formerly worked at Google and who reviewed the Calif research but wasn't involved in the testing.
Apple, which is deploying and testing frontier AI models to test and patch vulnerabilities, is reviewing the Calif report to validate its findings. "Security is our top priority, and we take reports of potential vulnerabilities very seriously," a company spokeswoman said.
The bug-finding capabilities of the latest AI models from companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI have improved enough in recent months that many cybersecurity experts are now warning of a Bugmageddon, an unprecedented rash of security vulnerability discoveries that could cause headaches for the technology staffers who must patch them, and also represent an unprecedented cybersecurity risk.
Earlier this year, Anthropic's AI found over 100 high-severity vulnerabilities in the Firefox browser over a two-week period. That is how many the rest of the world typically finds in two months.
Last September, Apple said it leveraged its hardware and operating system expertise into a technology called Memory Integrity Enforcement $(MIE)$, which it described as "the culmination of an unprecedented design and engineering effort, spanning half a decade."
With Claude, building the code that exploited the two MacOS bugs took five days, Calif says.
The attack couldn't have been pulled off by Mythos alone and leveraged the very human cybersecurity expertise of some of Calif's hackers, said Thai Duong, the company's chief executive. That is because Mythos excels at reproducing previously documented attacks. "We haven't seen cases where it comes up with new attack techniques," he said. "This is kind of a new thing."
While some of the hype around Mythos is "overblown," Zalewski said it is possible to use the latest tools for "meaningful vulnerability research and code auditing."
Researchers with the company were so excited about their discovery, they drove down from Palo Alto in person Tuesday to Apple's Cupertino headquarters to present their 55-page report describing the bugs it exploited.
They plan to release details of their attack once Apple has patched the underlying issues. The bugs will likely be fixed pretty quickly, Duong said.
The White House initially opposed Anthropic's efforts to gradually expand access to Mythos, and concerns about the power of newer AI models have upended the administration's AI strategy, causing a reassessment of its laissez-faire approach to AI development. Federal officials are now contemplating an executive order that would grant the government oversight of the most-advanced models.
Write to Robert McMillan at robert.mcmillan@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 14, 2026 14:23 ET (18:23 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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