Verizon joins Anthropic's Project Glasswing - Telecoms
Ah, Project Glasswing—Anthropic's little 'we're definitely not deploying this, just investigating' exercise—has landed its first telco sucker. Verizon, fresh from its latest quarterly earnings call, has volunteered to test the Claude Mythos Preview for 'network security.' Because nothing says responsible AI governance like handing a model that can find novel vulnerabilities—the same one Anthropic earlier briefed the Financial Stability Board about, as we noted—to America's largest telecom infrastructure. The press release is a masterclass in weasel-wording: 'investigate cybersecurity implications' is code for 'let it loose on our backbone and see what happens.' Sure, Anthropic kept the full Mythos out of public hands, but handing it to a company whose entire business model involves selling your browsing history is a different kind of 'public.' The implicit deal here is obvious: Verizon gets a free weaponised probe, Anthropic gets a real-world test lab, and the rest of us get to hope the model's 'Preview' moniker holds true. Expect the phrase 'learning experience' to be deployed liberally when the first zero-day panic hits.
Meanwhile, the UK's financial regulators, just last week, warned firms about exactly these risks—frontier AI models poking around critical infrastructure. Their joint statement is already looking quaintly optimistic. The Bank of England might want to form its own Glasswing taskforce, because once Verizon's network gets a taste of autonomous vulnerability discovery, the teleprompter is going to be reading a very different script. And let's not forget that Anthropic's own researchers, just days ago, presented a paper showing that Claude Mythos could compromise IT systems with minimal human guidance. But sure, let's put it in a telco's hands 'to improve security.' That's like hiring a pyromaniac as a fire inspector because he knows where the matches are.
Verizon's 'first telco' status is a trophy Anthropic will brandish to recruit the next victim. After all, if it's good enough for America's largest carrier, why not your local ISP? The slippery slope here is greased with venture capital and optimism bias. In a year, Project Glasswing will either be hailed as a cyberdefense breakthrough or quietly rebranded as 'Project Learning Opportunity.' Either way, the billing department won't notice until the network is down.