Tag: security

Reports: Fable 5 won’t answer even simple questions on its restricted topics

Hardly any questions about cybersecurity, biology or chemistry get through to Fable 5. (Picture: Shutterstock)
As more people are testing out Anthropic’s new, Mythos-class Fable 5, many are finding it so restrictive it wont even answer the most basic questions, TechCrunch writes.

The Verge tested it on the fundamentals of biology and found it wouldn’t even answer «easy» questions, about cell membranes or on how mRNA vaccines work.

TechCrunch is reporting on several developers who are complaining that just including the word «cyber» in a query is enough to trip it up, while others say it even refuses to write «secure» code, thinking it might be cybersecurity related.

In order to release the Mythos-based model, Anthropic made a tradeoff on very strict limits for it, and the fallback option is the still very capable Claude Opus 4.8, released in late May.

These tight restrictions aren’t by mistake, Anthropic says;

— To deploy Fable 5 safely, we believe it was necessary to be overly conservative with our safeguards so they block most queries tied to biology work, Anthropic spokesperson Paruul Maheshwary told The Verge.

Read more: TechCrunch and The Verge.

Anthropic releases Mythos-class Fable 5 and Mythos 5, with strong safeguards

Fable 5 uses a second AI to monitor throughput and prevent misuse. (Picture: Anthropic)
After refusing to release any Mythos models for fear of abuse of its advanced cyber firepower, Anthropic has finally come up with enough safeguards to make it to general rotation. Its capabilities «exceed those of any model we’ve ever made available,» they say.

— The capabilities of models like Fable 5 and Mythos 5 have the potential to do profound good for the world, Anthropic writes in its presentation, and adds — We’ve also seen it in life sciences research, where the models are positing novel hypotheses and speeding up the development of new therapeutics.

Continue reading “Anthropic releases Mythos-class Fable 5 and Mythos 5, with strong safeguards”

Anthropic: 80% of code for Claude is written with Claude, calls for slowdown

Human review might take more time than writing the code in the near future, Anthropic says. (Picture: Anthropic)
Recursive self-improvement may come sooner than we are prepared for, the AI lab says in a new report.

They are now foreseeing a not-so-distant future where Claude can autonomously write and improve on itself, and is warning that humans might lose control.

Compared to 2021-2025, Anthropic is now producing 8x more code with AI tools, and this rate is doubling every four months, approaching a point where human judgment could become the bottleneck in software design.

With the more capable Mythos Preview model, researchers at the company estimate they could output another 4 times as much code on top of the already accelerating trend.

There is no sign of this progress stopping, and Anthropic is now calling for a global slowdown so that society has time to adapt. Even if growth did stop, or somehow development stalled, we are only just beginning to scratch the surface of adopting the already existing technology, the lab says.

Read more: Anthropic’s report, launch thread summary, Axios, The WSJ. DIscussion on r/Singularity.

The EU plans for «technological sovereignty» with huge investments

The European Union has a long checklist of things to improve in the AI age, and stands ready to invest «at scale.» (Picture: Shutterstock)
The EU is increasingly concerned at their reliance on the USA for all things cloud, software and AI, and is taking urgent steps to counter it, or, as they put it, to «strengthen Europe’s digital resilience.»

— We cannot afford to depend on others for the technologies that keep our hospitals running, our energy grids stable and our services secure, Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen says in a statement.

Continue reading “The EU plans for «technological sovereignty» with huge investments”

The Trump White House releases long awaited Executive Order on AI

The order sets up a voluntary sharing scheme of models meeting a yet to be determined threshold. (Picture: Shutterstock)
The order was initially planned for late May, but would put what the President thought were too onerous demands on the industry.

The new order, released on June 2, reduces the voluntary sharing window to 30 days, waxes poetic about unleashing innovation in the AI labs, and says they make the USA stronger. It also says that capabilities have evolved to a point where national security becomes an issue.

Continue reading “The Trump White House releases long awaited Executive Order on AI”

China begins restricting foreign travel for private AI professionals

China is increasingly worried about technology leaks and talent poaching. (Picture: Adobe)
Sources are telling Bloomberg that China has established a list of AI engineers that will now have to ask permission from authorities before traveling abroad.

The move comes after seeing the astronomical wages being offered for valuable AI competence by US labs, such as Meta, Bloomberg writes, but notes that China sees AI labs as a strategic asset and are concerned about data leaks.

The previous policy included restrictions for individuals that were senior researchers in education, nuclear scientists and top executives of government companies, Tom’s Hardware writes.

Before this, AI workers on the list only had to report where they were traveling, but did not have to ask for specific permission.

The new rules might inspire early-stage talent with international ambitions to leave the country before getting added to the list, and dissuade overseas talent from moving home to China, Bloomberg says.

Read more: Bloomberg, Tom’s Hardware, and The Decoder.

Mythos finds 10K severe bugs in a month, as Anthropic widens release

Anthropic is now expanding availability for government and qualifying security teams. (Picture: Shutterstock)
Officially dubbed the Claude Mythos Preview, Anthropic’s code-busting agent has worked with about 50 partners to find ten thousand high-severity bugs in the month since release:

— Progress on software security used to be limited by how quickly we could find new vulnerabilities. Now it’s limited by how quickly we can verify, disclose, and patch the large numbers of vulnerabilities found by AI, Anthropic says.

Of those vulnerabilities, 6,202 were serious finds in open source software, where Anthropic has partnered with «more than 1,000» projects. Mythos actually found 23,019 bugs, but most were estimated at medium or low severity.

— Models with similar cybersecurity skills to Mythos Preview will soon be more broadly available, says Anthropic.

— There is a clear need for a larger effort across the software industry to manage the volume of findings that these models will generate.

Therefore, Anthropic is widening the release of Mythos, making it available to «qualifying» security teams «on request.» In the future, they say they hope to develop safeguards strong enough to make it generally available, but no such safety features exist as of today.

Read more: Anthropic’s findings and Engadget. Discussion on r/cybersecurity

«Anti-doomers» breathe easy after Trump cancels AI executive order

Not singing anything today. Executives and insiders were worried about their competitive edge. This image is from April 30. (Picture: Whitehouse.gov)
The White House was all lined up for a long-rumored executive order on AI, but it was abruptly canceled at a late stage.

Donald Trump declared that «I don’t like certain aspects of it,» and said that the USA is «leading China, we’re leading on everybody» and that he doesn’t want to get in the way of that.

The draft order was designed to appease «doomers» within the Trump coalition who were worried about the advanced capabilities of some models that might pose serious cybersecurity risks.

One of the provisions was to have AI labs «voluntarily» submit their models to the government for review 90 days in advance, and also give access to «critical infrastructure providers,» Reuters reported.

DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis reckoned in January that China is «just months» behind the US in capabilities, and many advocates said the provision could hurt this competitiveness.

The order is now indefinitely postponed, but The White House has other AI security initiatives in the works, Axios reports.

Read more: Axios, Reuters, Washington Post (paywalled), and The NYT (paywalled).

OpenAI’s security tools gets Codex Security and a new brand: «Daybreak»

Security for the (vetted) masses is the promise of Daybreak (Picture: OpenAI)
Billed as the answer to Anthropic’s Mythos model, the new branding is basically just a suite of the models released last week — such as ChatGPT-5.5-Cyber — and the new Codex Security.

— Daybreak combines the intelligence of OpenAI models, the extensibility of Codex as an agentic harness, and our partners across the security flywheel to help make the world safer for everyone, OpenAI writes.

The more advanced models require a screening of users, and the better they get, the more serious the vetting.

— Because those same capabilities can be misused, Daybreak pairs expanded defensive capability with trust, verification, proportional safeguards, and accountability.

Also new is that OpenAI now offers a vulnerability scan as a way into the ecosystem, available for businesses of all sizes and systems.

Read more: OpenAI’s presentation, The Verge.

Anthropic’s Claude no longer threatens with blackmail when told to turn off

Stories of AI being self-preserving and evil were the culprit, Anthropic believes.
Remember the big news that Claude 4 would blackmail engineers at risk from turning it off? That was revealed from alignment testing in June, 2025.

But as of Claude Haiku 4.5, from October 2024, blackmail is no longer an issue, Anthropic says.

They believe they traced the issues to internet text portraying AI as evil and self-preserving, but honestly, that is a fairly common cultural trope.

Reinforcement training didn’t help the issue, training on «examples of safe behavior» didn’t work — but introducing a dataset of ethically challenging situations did.

Then they introduced lots of fictional stories of AI behaving in aligned ways and further dropped the blackmail instances by a factor of three, then adding system prompts targeting «harmlessness» did the rest.

Anthropic does say that this does not eliminate the risk entirely: «our auditing methodology is not yet sufficient to rule out scenarios in which Claude would choose to take catastrophic autonomous action.»

Read more: Anthropic’s research, on X.com, TechCrunch, and Business Insider.

GPT-5.5 -Cyber is out in «limited preview,» available to vetted defenders


Two models models are launching today; GPT-5.5 with «Trusted Access for Cyber» that requires some vetting to get into. It can handle defensive security, do code review, malware analysis and patch validation.

GPT-.5.5-Cyber requires stronger verification and does specialized workflows, red teaming, penetration testing and controlled validation.

GPT-5.5 Cyber was earlier found on par with Anthropic’s Mythos model, that has been spooking the establishment lately.

The vetting approach for the Cyber model has been «informed by conversations with cybersecurity and national security leaders across federal and state government and major commercial entities,» OpenAI says.

Read more: OpenAI’s blog, CNBC, Axios.

The White House reportedly discussing vetting AI models ahead of release

The White House says any Executive Order will come from the President himself. (Picture: Adobe)
The Trump administration has appartently been spooked by the cyber capabilities of Anthropic’s Mythos model and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 — and is considering an Executive Order to vet new models ahead of release, Axios and the NYT reports.

These models have both been limited for their ability in cybersecurity, and point to a not-so-distant future where such capabilities might be widely available.

To that end, the White House’s Office of the National Cyber Director held all of two meetings last week, with tech and cyber companies on the one hand and with trade groups in tech on the other, according to Axios.

The ONCD has also been discussing safety testing for federal AI deployments, by assessing the security exposure of AI models before rolling out to the public sector.

The NYT reported on this first, and is saying that there might be a safety review for new models, while giving the Pentagon the first shot at eventual «useful» cyber capabilities, but would not block their release.

Any discussion on «potential executive orders is speculation,» a White House official told Axios.

Read more: Axios and the New York Times.

GPT-5.5 found on par with Mythos, with OpenAI to limit access to Cyber version

It took about three weeks for a competing model to hit parity with Mythos. (Picture: Adobe)
After a major research paper by the UK’s AI Security Institute found GPT-5.5 a little better than Mythos, Sam Altman moved to limit access to the Cyber version of the model.

The paper probes «vulnerability research and exploitation against realistic targets and modern mitigations» through rigorous tests, and found GPT-5.5 had a pass rate of 71.4%, compared to Mythos’ 68.6% on the most advanced evaluations.

According to the AISI, their test suite proves that Mythos is not a one-off act of brilliance, but part of a wider trend for frontier models. They say «we should expect further increases in cyber capability from models in the near future, potentially in quick succession.»

At the same time, Sam Altman posted on x.com that OpenAI will indeed follow Anthropic’s lead on limiting access to GPT-5.5-Cyber to «critical cyber defenders:»

— We will work with the entire ecosystem and the government to figure out trusted access for cyber; we want to rapidly help secure companies/infrastructure, Altman wrote.

Read more: The AI Security Institute, Altman’s x post, TechCrunch. Discussion on r/Singularity.

Private Discord group gains access to Mythos — to «play around» with it

The unnamed group has not run any cybersecurity prompts for fear of losing access. (Picture: adobe)
Bloomberg (paywalled) is reporting that a «private online forum» has managed to get access to Anthropic’s heralded Mythos model — said to be so advanced, it would be too dangerous to release.

— We’re investigating a report claiming unauthorized access to Claude Mythos Preview through one of our third-party vendor environments, Anthropic tells TechCrunch.

The group is part of a Discord channel focused on finding information on unreleased models, and made some educated guesses as to where the model would be located. They also had some help from a member whose job gave him access.

As for the warnings of dangerous fallout from public access to the model, the group says they are only interested in «playing around with new models,» not «wreaking havoc,» Gizmodo says, but the «hack» itself will raise concern in the security sector.

Read more: Bloomberg (paywalled), TechCrunch, and Gizmodo.

Mozilla uses Mythos to fix 271 bugs in latest Firefox, claims «vertigo»

The Mythos model is only available to select organizations for defensive cybersecurity. (Picture: generated)
The browser developer has been working with Anthropic since February, and got their hands on an early version of Claude Mythos Preview to scan for vulnerabilities.

— For a hardened target, just one such bug would have been red-alert in 2025, and so many at once makes you stop to wonder whether it’s even possible to keep up, Mozilla writes in their blog.

The upshot is that the 271 bugs mean that the company can approach security «much better than just keeping up», and that «defenders finally have a chance to win, decisively.»

— We have many years of experience picking apart the work of the world’s best security researchers, and Mythos Preview is every bit as capable, Mozilla continues.

They used Claude Opus 4.6 to find 22 bugs back in March, but this Mythos-powered bug hunt was so large it left them with a feeling akin to vertigo, they say.

Read more: Mozilla’s blog, interview on Wired, writeups on Ars Technica and Engadget.