Move over bitcoin and quantum risks. Anthropic’s Mythos AI could have major implications for DeFi
Claude Mythos Preview identified thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities across every major operating system and browser, including in cryptography libraries that DeFi infrastructure depends on.
What to know:
- Anthropic’s new Claude Mythos Preview model has autonomously discovered serious zero-day vulnerabilities in widely used software, outperforming both human researchers and existing automated tools.
- The model uncovered long-hidden flaws in systems such as OpenBSD, FFmpeg, and core Linux components, and demonstrated it can rapidly turn known bugs into full working exploits at low cost.
- Anthropic reports that Mythos has found critical weaknesses in major cryptography libraries and protocols like TLS, AES-GCM, and SSH, raising urgent security concerns for DeFi and other crypto infrastructure that rely on friction-based defenses such as multisig, timelocks, and audits.
Cracks long-hidden vulnerabilities
Like finding a needle in a million haystacks, the model, Claude Mythos Preview, has a knack for uncovering software bugs that have long eluded human experts.
It found a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD, an operating system built specifically to be hard to hack, for under $50 in compute.
It found a 16-year-old flaw in FFmpeg, the video software that powers most of the internet’s streaming infrastructure, that had been scanned five million times by automated security tools without anyone catching it.
It even wrote a browser exploit that chained four separate vulnerabilities together to break through two layers of security. And it took a publicly known Linux vulnerability and turned it into a full working attack in under a day for under $2,000, a job that would normally take a skilled human researcher weeks.
