Anthropic is having a busy week. On Thursday, the San Francisco-based AI lab announced it had raised $65 billion in a new funding round that valued the company at $965 billion, making it the most valuable AI startup in the world.
On the same day, it also shipped Claude Opus 4.8, a new AI model that Anthropic says is less likely to deceive users or cooperate with misuse than its predecessors. In the same announcement, Anthropic said it expects to bring its Mythos-class models to all customers “in the coming weeks.”
Mythos, the existence of which was first reported by Fortune in March, is notable for its coding and cyber capabilities, including the ability to find vulnerabilities in existing software and chain these vulnerabilities together to execute sophisticated cyber attacks. The model has raised concerns that it could allow hackers to easily compromise the networks and software that control critical infrastructure, from financial systems to electric grids, and Anthropic has so far allowed only a select group of users to access the model in order to find vulnerabilities in their own software and patch them. It said it would not release the model more widely until it had developed safeguards to make it more difficult for hackers to exploit its capabilities for malicious purposes.
