I’m sure by now you’ve all read the news about Anthropic’s new “Mythos” model and its apparently “dangerous” capabilities in finding security vulnerabilities. I’m sure everyone reading this also has opinions about that. Well, here are a few of mine. Is it all just hype? Firstly, it’s tempting to dismiss the announcement as pure marketing…

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Neil Madden

Anthropic's new Mythos model claims dangerous capabilities in finding security vulnerabilities. The author argues the hype is partially warranted but contextualizes the risk: costs of $10k-20k per vulnerability make it unlikely to be run broadly, and it's best viewed as a pentest add-on. A key insight is that Mythos succeeds largely because of oracles like AddressSanitizer that filter false positives — the same reason agentic AI coding works (type checkers, linters, test suites). Without oracles, LLM-based vulnerability finders drown in false positives. The author warns that AI tools won't fix the root causes of poor software security; real solutions require memory-safe languages, capability-based security, and slower, more deliberate development — not faster AI-assisted code generation.

Mythos and its impact on security