NSA is using Anthropic's Mythos despite blacklist

THIS administration? As if we just arrived here in 2024?

> The whole artificial scarcity Anthropic created around Mythos / Glasswing is quite brilliant to be honest

Isn’t that just the same strategy OpenAI has used over and over? Sam Altman is always “OMG, the new version of ChatGPT is so scary and dangerous”, but then releases it anyway (tells you a lot about his values—or lack thereof) and it’s more of the same. Pretty sure Aesop had a fable about that. “The CEO who cried ‘what we’ve made is too dangerous’”, or something.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_Who_Cried_Wolf

> This puts the US government into a loose / loose position.

You might even call it... a tight spot

Mythos is most certainly not hype. I think it might be the agent with most agency as of today (ability to get really difficult shit done on its own). I believe that it most certainly is not hype. A realization just struck me that guarding the model weights (which are probably in the realm of a few TB) should be of utmost importance. Essentially - having access to them and a small NVIDIA cluster is all it takes for anybody to start using Mythos for themselves.

Barring any limitations of my understanding, the Mythos model weights are probably in the realm of a few TB. Any actor with access to the weights + a single beefy NVIDIA cluster and a few intelligent folks is all it takes to gain access to Mythos.

Cost of infra < $5 million (guesstimate). Imagine someone pulling that off by gaining access to the weights - which would be a monumental challenge, but likely less complicated than re-acquiring enriched substances from the gulf nation under attack right now. It would be the heist of the century.

It is pretty obvious from the token speed that opus now is sonnet or haiku size a few versions ago. So Mythos is likely what was called opus. They dont tell us the size but they did co firm the training run for Mythos was under the 10^26 flops reporting requirement.

In an alternate universe, opus 4.7 is sonnet 5, and Mythos is released as Opus. Can you imagine how much praise would be heaped on Anthropic if it opus 4.7 was < half the price it is now?

> Glasswing

Fun fact, the model isn't quite the important part for Glasswing, someone took the ideas, and made their own open alternative, you can swap out models and find issues in code using clearwing. I haven't had a chance to personally test it, but it makes a lot of sense to me.

https://github.com/Lazarus-AI/clearwing

it's a taste of what's to come, the anointed class with access to the latest and greatest model in exchange for favours or $$$$, and an underclass making do with the hobbled toy models.

They created the model specifically to play this game.

Plot twist it gets acquired by the US govt.

Worth noting that Trump was one who labeled them a supply chain risk for the horrible crime of setting really basic guardrails around usage. (And it's "lose" btw)

'Anthropic is / isn't lying about Mytho's capabilities' is the less interesting conversation.

The more interesting one is:

   1. Assuming even incremental AI coding intelligence improvements
   2. Assuming increased AI coding intelligence enables it to uncover new zero day bugs in existing software
   3. Then open source vs closed source and security/patch timelines will all need to fundamentally change

Whether or not Mythos qualifies as (1), as long as (2) is true then it seems there will eventually be a model with improvements, which leads to (3) anyway.

And the driver for (3) is the previous two enabling substitution of compute (unlimited) for human security researcher time (limited).

Which begs questions about whether closed source will provide any protection (it doesn't appear so, given how able AI tools already are at disassembly?), whether model rollouts now need to have a responsible disclosure time built in before public release, and how geopolitics plays into this (is Mythos access being offered to the Chinese government?).

It'll be curious what happens when OpenAI ships their equivalent coding model upgrade... especially if they YOLO the release without any responsible disclosure periods.

I'm really tired of these claims that Mythos is "nothing by PR hype". It should be at this point eminently clear that the people working at Anthropic believe the things they say about their models. And for mythos in particular, at this point there are far too many people outside of Anthropic who have seen it and/or the vulnerabilities it has discovered for "it's nothing but hype" be anything close to a sensible position. I'm not saying we should blindly believe them; they have often used more caution than was entirely warranted (this is, in my opinion, a good thing) but the idea that all of this around Mythos and glasswing is nothing but marketing hype is nonsense. Might a disinterested 3rd party decide that they think the fire is smaller than Anthropic's smoke warranted? Yes that's possible. But the idea that it's all smoke and no fire at this point deserves no resepect whatsoever.

I'm kind of surprised that C-suite folks fall for this marketing ploy when many of them are typically very close to the sales process in very high stakes areas. I guess it just shows you that anyone is susceptible to a well done grift. On second thought I'm thinking back through the history of C-suite decisions I've seen first and second hand and I'm not surprised at all.

The position doesn't matter. Nobody sane listens to what the orange or "the USA" says because it could be the complete opposite tomorrow. Which sadly is exactly the position where the orange wants to be. Free reign for him and nobody cares.

It's like opening up an exclusive night club. Everyone is talking about it and wants in, even though most know nothing about what's actually inside.

Not only that, but I feel there's a lot to validity of this meme from reddit: https://i.redd.it/jxfayl16q5wg1.jpeg .

Maybe not "completely out", but at least not having enough available capacity to release a model way bigger than Opus publicly.

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> The whole artificial scarcity Anthropic created around Mythos / Glasswing is quite brilliant to be honest (I’m Not saying ethical, just brilliant). The commercial gains are one side of course.

You mean the obvious commercial losses caused by keeping an expensively created product effectively off the market altogether?

What the actual fuck is with people who come up with stuff like this?

I think Dario didn't get a Gmail invitation back in the day, and now he's taking it out on everyone.

I'd be okay with our military / NSA having the best model possible.

Now if only the NSA would vet key people in our government, there should be no reason a foreign entity can just hack the FBI director's personal GMAIL, the NSA should be trying to break into their accounts before our enemies do. It's ridiculous that they're not already doing this.

You're misunderstanding.

The government is the one that said it didn't want/couldn't use this "weapon."

Anthropic has been giving companies access to the model. I think people on here have fallen for it once again. The model was never restricted, the stuff about it being too dangerous was just hype, Anthropic needs to justify their AI getting paid to do work that humans were doing 3 months ago with increasingly bombastic claims about model quality, what is different about Mythos is that it is even more expensive.

Something in favor of this is the fact that it runs in their cloud and literally tells you that it costs I think $10 to $25 per run

No

Why would they use their most expensive model when sonnet or opus can do the job as well?

It would be pretty simple to see what API they're calling.

Snowdens document leaks happened in 2013 (implying the surveillance state was set up well before then). So this is more a leisurely stroll than a sprint.

last week's "truth" (https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1164091464198...)

"I am willing to risk the giving up of my Rights and Privileges as a Citizen for our Great Military and Country! Our Military Patriots desperately need FISA 702, and it is one of the reasons we have had such tremendous SUCCESS on the battlefield."

Roko’s Basilisk has now tagged you for eternal suffering.

along those lines, this is a “fun” (albeit tangential) read https://x.com/PalantirTech/status/2045574398573453312?s=20

You realize Mythos can read this, right? I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords.

The new movie Mercy is a good take in this, as fiction.

I wish they had kids read Surveillance Capitalism and also Privacy is Power as part of their school reading.

For once the accelerationists were proven right.

I'm sorry Dave. I can't do that.

Why do you think it as aligned with you, and not the US Government. How many data centers can you build?

Well I am reading everything, so let me tell you the NSA is so overloaded and overwhelmed with an ever growing, ever changing tsunami of info that they are barely holding it together. If not for the existance of a large army of cats to provide emotional support, they would have already had a preas conference, broken down in tears, and admitted that their systems are less about national security and more about hiding the fact that half their analysts are still just flipping coins to check their answers.

And what do I get in return?

I am willing to bet against that

This is all just a pump for their IPO so...

Every US intelligence org probably has at least API access, but anything outside of the US? No chance.

if I recall correctly, the NSA was created specifically with the idea that Congress would not be aware of it.

It’s easy to find sketchy lines of code in any large C project.

The big advance that they are claiming with Mythos is the ability to triage all the hundreds of candidate vulns and automatically generate exploits to prove that the real ones are real. And if they’re really finding 27-yr-old 0-days in OpenBSD, then it’s not just hype.

> make some of it vulnerable with a known vulnerability and Gemma will tell you

Well, yeah.

Isn't the idea finding unknown vulnerabilities?

> The whole thing is a psyop - wow it’s so amazing we can’t give it to you.

Anyone else still remembers when OpenAI refused to release GPT2-xl because it was "too powerful"?

I find that confidence quite unsettling considering everything we know about just the government in general, not even to mention what Snowden released, and I know he did not release everything.

Are you at all familiar with what Snowden released? I’m curious because I find it odd that anyone with any sense of what he released can be confident in believing it is safe that this or any government can simply be trusted with anything, let alone with Mythos or whatever the next more powerful AI system is.

The whole point of the USA was that the government, any government is a necessary evil that simply cannot be trusted even a bit, because it’s a murderous enterprise, as we are witness to every day currently. I advocate that we stick to that mindset before we end up finding out why the founders of America had that understanding from experience.

It's guerilla marketing :)

> The National Security Agency is using Anthropic's most powerful model yet, Mythos Preview, despite top officials at the Department of Defense — which oversees the NSA — insisting the company is a "supply chain risk," two sources tell Axios.

https://www.axios.com/2026/04/19/nsa-anthropic-mythos-pentag...

"two sources" I guess

nice try mr FBI agent

Haven't you heard? Under the new form of government in the US, random tweets from the President ARE government policy, superseding laws and any act of Congress.

The Supreme Court has blessed this new form of government, declaring that the President is immune to all laws, but retaining for themselves the right to reverse any tweet on the "shadow docket".

Anthropic is on a blacklist. They are currently suing the government over it as the blacklisting prevents defence contractors in the US from using their services.

This is the best link I could find quickly about it, a WSJ gift link so it can be read without a subscription:

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/anthropic-sue...

Do you deny the reported bug finding capabilities, or do you deny that they are dangerous?

This seems cynical. Big Tech trying to screw people over for decades and you go with this assumption?

We must imagine Big Tech Benevolent.

Seriously though. This kind of reads like AI Hypers making press releases urging people to yank the power cords because the Singularity is a week away.

> The model is the company's "most capable yet for coding and agentic tasks," Anthropic has previously said, referring to the model's ability to act autonomously.

> Its capabilities to code at a high level have given it a potentially unprecedented ability to identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities and devise ways to exploit them, experts have said.

Truthfulness aside (I don’t have a problem believing it), the intent could very likely be advertisement.

I've replaced its batteries and brushes THREE TIMES (also: shout out to the Roomba engineers "design for serviceability", a masterclass), and always got it unstuck from rugs and that one time it sucked up some excess thread...

I say please and thank you to Siri. May I also be on the nice list?

More people should be nice to their tech. It shows empathy, and a little whimsy now and then never hurt anyone

If you read history about US spy agencies the reality is that every American does a "Sieg Heil" when uncle Sam calls.

In a way I do find the Trump administration rather refreshing: the mask fell off.

They're referring to Pete Hegseth's decision to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk back in early May.

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/05/pentagon-tells-anth...

Anthropic has been designated a Supply Chain risk, the whole company.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/where-stand-department-war