Another wave of fear echoed this week when the NSA reportedly discovered multiple vulnerabilities within its own cybersecurity systems during its tests with Mythos. If that agency – which reportedly boasts the most impenetrable cybersecurity in the world – could be hacked by Mythos, what hope does the rest of the world’s cybersecurity infrastructure have?
This latest round of panic started with something like a game of telephone: Someone says one thing, which another repeats, and then another, and along that chain of communication, the original statement gets distorted. Last week, The Economist informed During a June 11 hearing before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia said that Mythos has broken down into “almost all of them.” [the NSA’s] Classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours.” Warner said he got this information from NSA head General Joshua Rood himself, who also leads the Pentagon’s Cyber Command division. On Monday, a coalition of intelligence agencies including the NSA and its counterparts in Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand issued an unusually public warning that the risks AI now poses to cybersecurity require a “whole of society response.”
The Economist’s report was seen by some as evidence that the worst fears about the Mythos were true, a reaction undoubtedly motivated by the aura of power and mystery that has gathered around the model in recent months. That aura has certainly been a boon for Anthropic, which recently dethroned OpenAI as the world’s most valuable startup and has what is expected to be a historic IPO.
But it’s also been a contributing factor in the latest clash with the Trump administration, which earlier this month ordered the company to restrict access to the Fable 5 to all foreign nationals, a “Mythos-class” model that was only recently made publicly available and which was built with security measures that were annoyingly stringent for some users. Citing national security concerns, the administration enacted an obscure piece of export control legislation, a move that, according to some legal experts, is spurious. Meanwhile, many cybersecurity experts argued that the ban would hamper U.S. cybersecurity defenses and give an edge to adversaries like China.
It appears that logic was proven correct on Tuesday report From The New York Times which stated that Trump’s ban – which also targeted another model called Mythos 5, which was made available only to a small group of organizations – had put the kibosh on the NSA’s internal tests with Mythos, and that the administration was now working with Anthropic to restore the agency’s access for limited purposes related to national security. The NSA did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
The same Times report also made clear that the NSA’s internal tests with Mythos were less destructive than online rumors suggested. According to federal officials cited in the report, the tests were so tightly controlled in a digital environment that there was little chance that a hacker or foreign intelligence agency could copy them. Officials also told the Times that even though Mythos was able to identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities, it did not actually exploit them.
The authors of the report in The Economist – which was the initial cause of all the concern – have also acknowledged that their portrayal of the NSA’s tests with Mythos was misleading. test “definitely [involved] Using Mythos with other tools in very special circumstances,” he wrote in a x post On Sunday. “I quoted [Senator Warner] To realize the power of mythos. But not adding warnings was a mistake.”
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