AI tool ‘too dangerous to release’ could wreak havoc on businesses
AI tool ‘too dangerous to release’ could wreak havoc on businesses
Publish Date: 2026-05-03 15:01:00
Source Domain: www.smh.com.au
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Australia’s largest cybersecurity firm has issued an urgent warning about a powerful new artificial intelligence tool that can find and exploit flaws in software at unprecedented speed and scale, and which experts fear could trigger the next wave of major data breaches.
CyberCX on Thursday told Australian businesses, banks and infrastructure operators they had a closing window to shore up their defences before the technology, or copies of it, reach the hands of criminals.
The warning deals with Claude Mythos Preview, an unreleased AI model built by US company Anthropic that the firm has deemed too dangerous to release publicly. Anthropic has restricted access to about 50 major technology and infrastructure partners – including Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon and JPMorgan Chase – under a program called Project Glasswing.
Mythos has already uncovered thousands of previously unknown software flaws, including a 27-year-old bug in an operating system used in firewalls and internet routers worldwide. In one test, it produced 181 working attacks against the Firefox web browser. An earlier, publicly available version managed just two.
Anthropic product lead Angela Jiang said the cyber capability had emerged partly as a by-product of the company’s broader push on coding and long-horizon agentic tasks.
“If something’s really good at coding, it’s also very good at detecting cyberattacks, especially over a bunch of different surfaces, and chaining that together,” Jiang said. The company had been “privileged to work with a bunch of companies to help improve critical infrastructure”.
Dimitri Vedeneev, secure AI lead at CyberCX, said it was not just Mythos’s ability to find long-buried vulnerabilities that set it apart, but also its capacity to chain multiple flaws together…
