Discord group says it accessed Anthropic’s unreleased Claude Mythos

An anonymous group of Discord users says it hacked its way into accessing Claude Mythos Preview, the new AI model Anthropic claims is too powerful for a public release.

Anthropic says Claude Mythos “is capable of identifying and then exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and every major web browser,” and has granted access to the model to a select group of partners via an initiative called Project Glasswing.

The AI company said this invite-only approach would let tech leaders “secure the world’s most critical software.” But it might need to pay more attention to its own software security.

As Bloomberg reports, the Discord users didn’t gain access through a sophisticated hack, but by guessing the online location for the model based on past Anthropic naming conventions — as found in the recent data breach at Mercor, an AI startup, earlier this month.

Once they identified where to access Claude Mythos, the group had to employ additional tactics. One member of the group already had privileged access as a worker at a third-party contractor for Anthropic, Bloomberg reports.

The group was part of a private Discord channel that focuses on hunting information about unreleased models.

A member of the group told Bloomberg that they were not using Claude Mythos for nefarious purposes, but for tasks like building simple websites. However, they also claimed to have access to even more unreleased Anthropic models.

The group provided enough evidence to convince Bloomberg they had indeed breached Anthropic’s security. Anthropic confirmed in a statement to Bloomberg it was aware of the claim and investigating.

At this time, there is no indication that Claude Mythos has been breached by other unauthorized parties. Still, given that Anthropic described Claude Mythos as a paradigm-shifting security threat that could “reshape cybersecurity” as we know it, any unauthorized access is —to say the least — concerning.

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