Is the AI Cybersecurity Apocalypse Already Here? |
In recent months, AI models have become much better at writing, debugging, and testing code. This has scrambled the AI race, making the software-focused Anthropic its leader and sending everyone else in pursuit of a new, more focused goal: improving coding tools and racking up as many excited and frightened enterprise customers as possible.
As these tools have become more capable at writing software, though, they’ve also gotten a lot better at figuring out how to break it. AI coding is rapidly automating parts of software development, but — at least and perhaps even more quickly — it’s automating hacking, too. Malicious actors have been using AI to help speed up and extend their capabilities for well over a year now with limited but real success; at the same time, software companies and open-source projects have been using AI tools to harden their software and find new vulnerabilities. The models’ recent ramp-up in coding capabilities has clarified the situation. If a software developer can now oversee a fleet of coding agents to knock out more features in less time, so too can someone whose objective is finding exploitable flaws in other people’s software in order to exfiltrate data, shut down systems, or hold them hostage for ransom.
This all gets particularly dicey when the technology takes a massive, sudden leap foward, which happens to describe how AI frontier model releases — which come from a tiny group of massive firms — can work. Anthropic says its next model is one such case:
Earlier today we announced Claude Mythos Preview, a new general-purpose language model. This model performs strongly across the board, but it is strikingly capable at computer security tasks. In response, we have launched Project Glasswing, an effort to use Mythos Preview to help secure the world’s most critical software, and to prepare the industry for the practices we all will need to adopt to keep ahead of cyberattackers.
Earlier today we announced Claude Mythos Preview, a new general-purpose language model. This model performs strongly across the board, but it is strikingly capable at computer security tasks. In response, we have launched Project Glasswing, an effort to use Mythos Preview to help secure the world’s most critical software, and to prepare the industry for the practices we all will need to........