American AI developer Anthropic plans to “lay the risks out on the table” even as it restricts deployment of a new model dubbed Mythos, whose powerful cybersecurity capabilities raise stark questions for companies and governments.
“We have a model that’s beginning to outstrip human capabilities in the cyber world,” Anthropic’s Paris-based chief of relations with startups and tech firms Guillaume Princen told AFP in an interview.
Mythos is “capable of spotting security holes that have existed for decades, in systems tested by both human experts and automated tools, that have never been discovered before,” he added.
Anthropic has delayed a general release of Mythos, sharing it first with a few dozen key American tech and financial services players — such as Nvidia, Amazon, Apple and JP Morgan Chase — to allow them to test and improve their security infrastructure.
But the company has also been accused of overhyping the powers of a technology which is its stock in trade — and the subject of fierce competition with rival OpenAI.
The Mythos news broke as rumours grow that Anthropic will list on the stock market this year.
“We prefer to be transparent and lay these risks out on the table,” Princen said, adding that AI safety concerns are “central to Anthropic’s DNA”.
“We don’t have all the answers, this has to be a conversation between tech actors like us who have the data, the academic world, the political world and the world of economists,” he added.
Mythos’ reported capabilities have unsettled the American financial sector and the European Union, which requested more information from Anthropic.
In an open letter to businesses, the British government said that Mythos “highlights the speed at which AI capabilities are increasing and the threats they potentially pose”.
Source: Insider Paper
