Anthropic investigating possible breach of its Mythos AI model

Anthropic is investigating a possible breach of Mythos, a new model the artificial intelligence company rolled out to a small pool of companies earlier this month to help them detect software vulnerabilities. 

The AI company behind the chatbot Claude is looking into a report of unauthorized access to Mythos from one of its third-party vendor environments, an Anthropic spokesperson told CBS News in an email. 

Anthropic works with a small number of third-party vendors to develop its AI models. So far, the company has not detected any breaches outside of its vendor environment or any compromises to the Anthropic systems.

Anthropic confirmed its investigation into the possible Mythos breach on Wednesday, a day after Bloomberg reported that a small group of unauthorized users had gained access to the tool, citing a person familiar with the matter.

Anthropic released Mythos to a limited group in April as part of an effort called Project Glasswing, billing the new model as more effective than competing AI systems at detecting software vulnerabilities.

At the time, Anthropic only shared the tool with a small group of major companies, including Amazon, Apple, Cisco, JPMorgan Chase and Nvidia, amid concerns that the new model could be exploited by hackers. The goal was to help these companies harden their defenses before bad actors can gain access to Mythos or similar AI models.

Federal officials, security experts and leaders at global institutions like the International Monetary Fund have all raised concerns about what might happen if Mythos falls into the wrong hands. While Project Glasswing is intended to help companies insulate themselves from cybersecurity threats, some experts are concerned that Mythos could also be used to exploit IT infrastructure at banks, hospitals, government systems and other organizations.

"We need to prepare ourselves, because we couldn't keep up with the bad guys when it was humans hacking into our networks," Alissa Valentina Knight, CEO of cybersecurity AI company Assail, previously told CBS News." We certainly can't keep up now if they're using AI because it's so much devastatingly faster and more capable.