Anthropic's Mythos set off a cybersecurity 'hysteria.' Experts say the threat was already here

Dario Amodei, co-founder and chief executive officer of Anthropic, at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, India, on Thursday, Feb. 19, 2026. Prakash Singh | Bloomberg | Global banks, tech giants and governments were sent scrambling last month to contain the risks posed by Mythos , the Anthropic model said to be so powerful that it has found thousands of previously unknown vulnerabilities in the world's software infrastructure. There's just one problem: The capability they're worried about is already here. Cybersecurity experts and artificial intelligence researchers told CNBC that the software vulnerabilities revealed by Mythos can be found using existing models, including those from Anthropic and OpenAI. "What we are seeing across the industry now is that people are able to reproduce the vulnerabilities found with Mythos through clever orchestration of public models to get very, very similar results," said Ben Harris , CEO of cybersecurity firm watchTowr Labs. Mythos has jolted executives and policymakers alike over concern that a perilous new era of AI-enabled cybercrime may be near. Anthropic limited its release to a few American companies including Apple , Amazon , JPMorgan Chase and Palo Alto Network to reduce the risk that bad actors get their hands on it. Even with that precaution, the release has prompted the Trump administration to consider new government oversight over future models. …