How Anthropic Learned Mythos Was Too Dangerous for the Wild
The AI company’s own experts warned Mythos could hack the systems beneath most modern computing. Banks and government agencies are racing to gauge the threat.
Photo illustration by 731. Photos: Getty (3)
One balmy February evening in Bali, Nicholas Carlini stepped away between events at a wedding, opened his laptop, and set out to do some damage. Anthropic PBC had just made a new artificial intelligence model, called Mythos, available for internal review, and Carlini — a well-known AI researcher — intended to see what kind of trouble it could cause.
Anthropic pays Carlini to stress-test its AI models to see whether hackers could leverage them for espionage, theft or sabotage. From Bali, where Carlini and his wife were attending an Indian wedding, he was staggered at what the model could do.