Nathaniel Whittemore

The source said that the group had been regularly using Mythos but hasn't used it for cybersecurity purposes in an attempt to avoid detection from Anthropic.

Instead, the group has been testing the model on relatively mundane tasks like website design.

The source said the group isn't interested in malicious use, they just want to play around with unreleased models.

Now, in terms of how they got access to this, the source said that Mythos was accessed through a third-party vendor where one member is employed, and it also required a few educated guesses based on information gleaned from the recent Mercore data breach.

Basically, the member working at the third-party vendor has general access to Anthropix models, including pre-release models, as part of an evaluation contract.

Anthropic responded to the report by stating, We're investigating a report claiming unauthorized access to Claude Mytho's preview through one of our third-party vendor environments.

Anthropic added that they have no evidence that access went beyond the third-party vendor's environment or that it's impacting Anthropic's systems.

Now, the discussion of this on X has been extremely breathless and overwrought, which is perhaps understandable given the way that Anthropic has chosen to promote this model.

Coincidentally, Sam Altman had some pretty pointed comments about the way Anthropic had introduced mythos.

In a podcast interview that came out earlier this week, he said,

If what you want is control of AI because we're the trustworthy people, I think fear-based marketing is probably the most effective way to justify that.

That doesn't mean it's not legitimate in some cases, but it is clearly incredible marketing to say, we have built a bomb, we're about to drop it on your head, we will sell you a bomb shelter for $100 million.

You need to run it to access all your stuff, but only if we pick you as a customer.

Wow, gloves are off.

And it seems like we might be getting OpenAI's different approach to that in not too long.

Lastly today, Google has released a big new upgrade to their Deep Research Agents.

The agent is now available in two flavors, the standard version and a state-of-the-art version called Deep Research Max.

The agent now features MCP support to connect to third-party data sources for the first time.

As part of MCP support, users can define arbitrary tools rather than relying on the agent to figure it out.

The agents can now also output charts and infographics within their report, tapping into the nano-banana models for image generation.