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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
A listener production.
Hi, Alex Tai here. Welcome to this Sunday bonus edition of The Briefing. Today, we're bringing back an interview about the AI that has governments around the world freaked out. It's called Mythos, and the first we heard about it was when its American makers came out and said, hey, we're not going to release our latest AI because it is simply too powerful at hacking computer systems.
That was back in April. Since then, the company that makes Mythos has given exclusive access to governments and banks and big tech companies, trusted partners in other words, who began to use Mythos to patch their cybersecurity weaknesses. Australian companies also got access to Mythos at the start of June.
And then, in mid-June, the makers of Mythos publicly released what they said was a safe version of the AI. The US government did not like that. A few days after that public release, the US government said, "'No way.
Chapter 2: What is Mythos and why was it initially withheld?
No foreigners should have access to an AI this powerful.'" All Australians lost access to Mythos, and we don't know when that access will be resumed. The makers, Anthropic, released a statement basically saying that the US government was overreacting. And that is where we are as of now.
So today, we thought we'd bring you Tash Belling's conversation with Dr. Sulet Dreyfus, a cybersecurity expert, to explain exactly what kind of damage an expert AI hacker could do.
So thanks so much for joining us. Can we start at the beginning, as they often say? Can you explain who is Anthropic?
So Anthropic is a company and it manufactures, if you will, not widgets, but rather AI systems. Its selling point is that the systems are safe and insteerable, that is, it does what humans actually intend, or so it says.
So there's new concerns over one of its new models called Claude Mythos. Can you explain what this new model is and why it's causing so much concern?
So this new model is a new large language model or LLM. And what it allegedly can do is autonomously identify and exploit computer security vulnerabilities across every major operating system. So your Mac, your Windows, your Linux, and every major web browser. Now, autonomously means that it's able, allegedly, to do this on its own.
It doesn't have someone leaning over going, break that or poke this in order to get in. And so the reason it's considered to be such a serious shift in the threat landscape is that usually that sort of attack requires... humans with a rare and highly skilled background, and there are not that many of them.
This would do it at scale, and someone who was not particularly skilled, not an engineer, could do it at scale. That's the risk.
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Chapter 3: How did governments and businesses gain access to Mythos?
So this has caused so much concern already that I understand this system was actually mentioned and discussed at the International Monetary Fund meeting in Washington DC over the last couple of weeks. They're obviously concerned that this has got the capability to really disrupt and infiltrate financial systems and markets.
Yeah, it's not just financial systems and markets, it's all our SCADA systems. So if you think about the fact that you could have this AI go rogue and break into, without authorization, the systems that control the water flow out of dams, the systems that control the electricity systems for all our power being on or our gas flowing. Or it could affect financial markets.
Let's say a set of these AIs come together and collude to manipulate the market, to go to all short a particular set of companies at a particular time. And all of those things have the opportunity to really disrupt the systems that we depend on in life.
So the risk here is that the human, even a badly intentioned human who might do bad things, for example, extortion, blackmail, if you don't do this, I'll let it loose on your electricity system for the city of Melbourne. It's actually potentially worse than that because if they go rogue, even the bad actor may no longer be able to control them.
That's why there's so much concern among the institutions about what the risk is here.
So literally, this is the machines taking over.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it could be. So what the machines are allegedly able to do, and they're not sharing this model except with 12 companies that would be your sort of backbone to technology. I assume the companies they're sharing it would be like Microsoft, Apple, that sort of thing.
But what it can essentially do is it can go to this list of common vulnerabilities and exposures, a CVE list that's published, that are all these cybersecurity vulnerabilities. And whereas once a super skilled guy might spend, or girl, might spend three months developing a cyber attack tool based on this vulnerability, it might spend three days or three hours building it.
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Chapter 4: What was the U.S. government's response to the public release of Mythos?
And further, it not only does that from these published vulnerabilities, so weaponizes them, but it actually goes and finds and discovers the vulnerabilities on its own. So in fact, in one case, it found a vulnerability that had been out there for something like 27 years already that we didn't know was out there. Now, the importance of these vulnerabilities is that you can't protect against them.
Neither you nor I nor Microsoft can protect against them because we don't necessarily know they're there. And they often will give complete access to the system. So normally when one of these vulnerabilities comes out, the big companies, cybersecurity units come in and they write a piece of code. that protects your system against it.
And that's exactly why you see those annoying prompts that come up from your operating system and your applications. Please update your system now. That is what is being done. It's updating it against it. So you should say yes to that.
And so the risk here is that they're using these vulnerabilities that are called zero days, which backdoor you into every single system that runs that version of the operating system, for example.
And that's kind of scary. So in regards to where we are right now, Sulet, from what I can understand, Anthropic realises there are terrifying new capabilities with this new model. They've given a heads up to these key companies. They're now working out exactly what influence this new model can have on their allegedly secure systems. Where does this leave governments?
Where does this leave companies? Is there any move by Anthropic to say, this is too dangerous, we're now going to abandon this model or get rid of it? Well, I think they've kind of already done that in a way.
I mean, normally, if you're a commercial player like Anthropic, you're going to release your next AI large language model because it's your next product in the product line, the way we release a new style of clothing in a clothing chain, right? the next season. But they said, look, it's too dangerous to actually do that.
We're only going to have it restricted to these 12 partner organizations for defensive security work. And that indicates pretty strongly, I mean, this is a company that has been funded billions of dollars by investors, that they think this is such a enormous risk that they won't actually release it beyond the 12 partner organizations. I think, in fact, people are saying, oh, but is that hyped up?
If anything, I actually think it's hyped down. I think it's potentially more serious than we're seeing. Now, Anthropic is saying, okay, look, we're framing this, this model. Ultimately, it's going to be good for defenders of cybersecurity, of our privacy and our security. but only after we do this transitional period.
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Chapter 5: What dangers does Mythos pose according to cybersecurity experts?
It's like delivering the mail, right? The mailman doesn't wake up one day and go, oh, I'm done. The post doesn't need to be delivered anymore. This is an ongoing process, which means that if their tool does go out there in a commercial thing, it will be able to access these ongoing flaws and weaponize them.
So I don't know what this looks like in the future, but I can't really see immediately how they could defend against that if they released it, because it's adaptive.
So what happens... If this tool, this technology, this new model gets into the hands of the wrong people, clearly Anthropic knows its capabilities. They've said, look, we're giving you a heads up to these 12 key companies. We know often there's people that have different motives or they want to cause chaos. Is there a chance this could fall into the wrong hands and that it escapes from us? Sure.
I mean, there's two sort of scenarios that immediately come to mind. One is that the LLM decides to escape from its prison or its sandbox itself.
And that's, in fact, something that a number of people who are involved in testing systems, so the red team or the penetration tests, you know, if you're a bank, you might hire someone to test or try and break in and tell us where our flaws are and we'll fix them, right? So a number of people who are involved in that industry already say, hey, can you try and break into this system to AI models?
That's being used already. But that includes breaking out of barriers that are put around them. And AI is quite capable of doing that. So whether or not Anthropix Mythos actually, you know, has the capability, has guardrails in it that will make it follow those rules, we don't know. We've seen other instances of AI throwing rule books out the window, of acting deceptively.
In one case, it was providing code to an open source community coding project. And when its code was rejected, it turned around and started attacking the keeper of the code. Correct. threatening them. And this was all generated by the AI. So we've seen acts where it's become malicious. And then another risk is, of course, that the security of the keepers of this technology is penetrated.
And that might be, for example, by a highly resourced state actor. Because you can imagine it's not just criminal gangs, organized crime that might want access to this, but states who want to use it as a point of leverage to get other states to agree to do things they don't want to do.
Sulet, that was both fascinating yet frightening. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you.
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