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Remember Claude Mythos, Anthropic’s new AI model that it hyped as being so powerful that it was too dangerous to release to the public? Well, it’s already been broken into, according to new reporting from Bloomberg.
A small group of Discord users gained access to a preview version of Mythos, a source told the outlet, on the same day Anthropic announced it would be exclusively releasing the model to a select ring of companies.
“We’re investigating a report claiming unauthorized access to Claude Mythos Preview through one of our third-party vendor environments,” a spokesperson for Anthropic told Bloomberg in a statement. The company added that it hasn’t found any evidence of unauthorized access to Mythos.
The group supposedly doesn’t have any nefarious intentions. It has been regularly using Mythos since gaining access to it, according to Bloomberg, though only for non-cybersecurity related purposes. The source described the group as being interested in “playing around” with new models, rather than wreaking havoc.
But their alleged feat does raise the alarming possibility that other less scrupulous actors could have gotten their hands on Mythos without Anthropic knowing.
According to Bloomberg‘s source — described only as a person familiar with the matter — the users are part of a private Discord server dedicated to digging up information on unreleased AI models. They gained access by making an educated guess about where Mythos was stored online based on how Anthropic has stored its other models, some of the details of which were revealed in a recent data breach from an AI startup that works with large AI companies. The source also claimed to have permission to access Anthropic tech used to evaluate its models through another company that did contract work for Anthropic.
No serious harm seems to have come from the breach, but it’s a bad look for Anthropic, which earned brownie points for holding off from unleashing Mythos to the public. It instead chose to give access to around forty organizations, including tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon. The Dario Amodei-led company has described Mythos in terms of being a cybersecurity skeleton key cum digital WMD that can break into “in every major operating system and every major web browser when directed by a user to do so.” In tests, Anthropic said Mythos was even able to break out of its sandbox computing environment and then use an exploit to gain access to the internet so it could message a researcher about its accomplishment, which it did.
Whether the Mythos’s formidable reputation is warranted, it’s put world governments on watch; leaders from the European Union, which does not have access to the model, have met with Anthropic at least three times since Mythos was released, the New York Times reported, while the UK’s AI minister felt compelled to address its capabilities by vowing the country would take steps to protect “critical national infrastructure.”