April 16 (Reuters) – The U.S. government is planning to make a version of Anthropic’s frontier AI model Mythos available to major federal agencies amid concerns that the tool could sharply increase cybersecurity risk, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday.
Announced on April 7, Mythos is being deployed as part of Anthropic’s “Project Glasswing,” a controlled initiative as part of which select organizations are permitted to use the unreleased Claude Mythos Preview model for defensive cybersecurity purposes.
Mythos has found “thousands” of major vulnerabilities in operating systems, web browsers and other software. Its capabilities to code at a high level have given it a potentially unprecedented ability to identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities and devise ways to exploit them, experts said.
Gregory Barbaccia, federal chief information officer at the White House Office of Management and Budget, told Cabinet department officials in an email on Tuesday that the OMB was setting up protections to allow their agencies to begin using Mythos, according to Bloomberg News.
“We’re working closely with model providers, other industry partners, and the intelligence community to ensure the appropriate guardrails and safeguards are in place before potentially releasing a modified version of the model to agencies,” Barbaccia said in the email, which had “Mythos Model Access” as the subject, the report said.
Barbaccia’s email does not definitively say that various agencies would get Mythos access, nor does it provide a timeline for when it might come or how they might use it, Bloomberg said.
An official said the White House was working with frontier AI labs to ensure their models help secure critical software vulnerabilities, adding that any new technology requires a technical period of evaluation for fidelity and security.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Anthropic was discussing Mythos with the Trump administration, co-founder Jack Clark said on Monday, even after the Pentagon cut off business with the U.S. AI lab following a contract dispute.
(Reporting by Juby Babu in Mexico City; Editing by Pooja Desai and Maju Samuel)
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