Anthropic Is Warning About Future Cyber Risks. Researchers Says Claude Code Is Already Dangerous.
A report by security startup LayerX warns that "anyone... can turn Claude Code into an attack tool." They add that Anthropic (admittedly a bit busy right now) never responded.
The Upshot
Yesterday, Anthropic announced a large-scale initiative to essentially wall off its own latest frontier AI model with yellow caution tape.
The unreleased model, called Claude Mythos Preview, is already so powerful a cybersecurity tool that it identified thousands of ‘high-severity’ vulnerabilities across every major operating system and web browser, including the one you’re probably using to read this article, Anthropic said.
In response, Anthropic announced Project Glasswing, an initiative looping in more than 40 companies like Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA and JPMorgan Chase to early Mythos Preview access, along with $100 million in usage credits, so they could start to address these weak links.
For startups, that means business as usual, right? The coalition of the giants is on it. No need to worry about hypothetical issues now being addressed by some of the world’s biggest cybersecurity teams.
The reality: when it comes to cyber risks, Anthropic’s already-released tools, including the hyper-popular Claude Code, are plenty powerful as it is – as demonstrated by a new report out today from a cybersecurity startup, LayerX.
Anthropic isn’t the only AI lab with vulnerabilities being flagged by startups. But given the heightened popularity of Claude Code among startup builders and programmers today – a big reason Anthropic recently announced its revenue run rate has reached $30 billion – such findings, and Anthropic’s spotty responses to them, should serve as a warning for startups leaning on its tools.
“We’re not kicking the dog because it’s down,” says Roy Paz, the AI researcher behind the new report. “We’re kicking it because this is the gold right now, and Anthropic are the only ones truly capable of this [kind of attack]. Everyone wants this nugget of gold.”
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