NSA said to be readying Anthropic’s Mythos for use in cyber operations

So Anthropic — the lab that solemnly calls for pause mechanisms and signs letters against bioweapons — is now helping the NSA weaponise its cybersecurity model. Around half-a-dozen engineers have been deployed to Fort Meade to ready Mythos for cyber operations. "Frontier cybersecurity AI," they call it. Sure. And the CIA's "preventative detention" programme was just administrative housekeeping.

The Financial Times report, picked up by TechCrunch, notes this is about Mythos — a model Anthropic has been pitching as the responsible answer to escalating cyber threats. No doubt it is. The same kind of responsible that saw Cambridge Analytica use Facebook data to "help" elections. When the world's largest intelligence agency embeds engineers from a safety-focused lab, you don't get oversight — you get a press release about "partnership in national security."

Let's be clear: Mythos might be brilliant at detecting vulnerabilities. It might even be used defensively, for now. But once the NSA has its hooks in a frontier model, the line between defence and offence gets very blurry, very fast. And Anthropic, the company that wanted an industry-wide kill switch, just handed the NSA the keys to the engine. Pass the sick bag, Alice.