Just months after the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) labelled Anthropic a "supply chain risk", completely cutting off the firm from being a vendor of any AI wares, a new report claims that the National Security Agency (NSA) is using Anthropic's cybersecurity-focused Mythos model "for offensive cyber operations" with the help of "half a dozen" staff from Anthropic embedded inside the agency. The report comes from Financial Times (FT), which cites "people familiar with the arrangement."
According to the report, the rationale behind the move is that the U.S.' adversaries will surely be using cybersecurity-focused AI models like Mythos, and gaining an early upper hand is fundamental. Regardless of political optics, this logic has some merit in the face of a security landscape that's shattering the usual 90-day vulnerability report window and bringing the zero-day exploit timeframe down to a nice round zero. It's worth noting that the FT's contacts are unaware as to whether the embedded staff are assisting in any active operations (as opposed to simply guiding the use of the technology and customizing models), but they expect the bot to be useful for "infiltrating the networks of nations such as China or Iran."
