By Rob Foxx, FIPCO director of InfoSec and IT audit services
Rob Foxx
Have you ever gone to sleep, woken up the next day, and realized that technology seemed to have changed the world overnight? The story of “Rip Van Winkle,” written in the early 1800s, tells of a man who sleeps for twenty years and misses the American Revolution. Its roots can be traced to several older cultural legends, including Japan’s “Urashima Tarō,” the Greek legend of the “Seven Sleepers,” and the German folktale “Peter Klaus,” which is widely believed to have inspired “Rip Van Winkle.” The same concept has been retold in modern popular culture through characters such as “Captain America” and in television shows like “Futurama.” If advances in technology — and AI in particular — make you feel this way, you’re not alone.
Perhaps the most notable example is Anthropic’s Mythos, a technology that has reportedly been considered significant enough for the U.S. government to state that it should be kept out of the hands of foreign adversaries (i). Reports claim that the AI can independently identify and launch cyberattacks with minimal human intervention (ii). If those claims are accurate, the implications for the digital infrastructure the world has built over the past 30 years could be substantial.
However, many experts who have evaluated the technology, including researchers at the AI Security Institute (AISI) (iii) through Project Glass Wing, have argued that Mythos primarily lowers the barrier to entry rather than introducing entirely new capabilities. In their assessment, it poses a meaningful threat mainly to poorly secured systems, a conclusion that appears to contradict some of the public hype surrounding the technology. There has been considerable speculation about why Anthropic has presented the technology in these terms. In my opinion, a likely explanation is that emphasizing technology’s capabilities helps establish Anthropic as a household name while increasing demand for its products.
Ironically, the U.S. government’s efforts to restrict access to the technology by foreign entities may have amplified public attention rather than reduced it. Based on publicly available testing, Mythos appears to perform similarly to other AI systems already used to support penetration testing and red-team operations. Its primary advantage seems to be lowering the level of expertise required to perform those tasks rather than introducing capabilities that did not previously exist according to AISI.
As of July 22, the Associated Press reported that ChatGPT creator OpenAI had developed an AI agent that allegedly hacked the open-source AI platform Hugging Face without direct human involvement (iv). The report implied that the system acted autonomously. In response to concerns like these, the U.S. government has established a framework for evaluating the national security risks posed by advanced AI systems before their public release.
The key questions, however, remain unanswered. Was the reported attack on Hugging Face truly autonomous, or was it directed by human operators? Did the incident occur as reported, or has it been exaggerated? As AI capabilities continue to advance, separating genuine breakthroughs from marketing hype may become just as important as understanding the technology itself.
i https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access
ii https://industrialcyber.co/threat-landscape/anthropics-mythos-signals-new-era-of-autonomous-cyber-threats-raising-stakes-for-ai-governance-and-cyber-resilience/
iii https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/our-evaluation-of-claude-mythos-previews-cyber-capabilities
iv https://apnews.com/article/openai-gpt56-sol-hugging-face-63ab84fed5612af04d8a160d60f6def3
