NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute
nytimes.com263 points by thm 2 days ago
263 points by thm 2 days ago
Unlocked: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/23/us/politics/nsa-lost-acce...
> The White House and intelligence officials had pushed forward a classified contract between Anthropic and the N.S.A., which would allow the spy agency to use the company’s technology for a variety of purposes, including intelligence analysis and detecting new computer vulnerabilities. Ironic that both sides are playing a horse shoe game: Gov: The model is both a supply chain risk and also we'll DPA you if you don't give it to us. Anthropic: The model is both like a nuclear weapon in terms of national security implications and safe for general release. I mean graphite control rods do exist in nuclear reactors to absorb excess neutrons, preventing the fuel from going critical & making it technically safe for general use (THOUGH of course disasters have happened) 'Mythos “broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours.”' Is Mythos a significant danger? The curl experience does not suggest that hysteria is warranted, but this gives me pause. Or, alternatively, it may suggest that the NSA’s classified systems are not very secure, which seems at least as possible: they may rely on requiring physical access to these systems to even attempt to penetrate them. Curl is such a small utility, and the effect of any single problem is limited. Mythos's great strength was finding multiple vulnerabilities and chaining them together to break a whole system. Look at it like this: It found one confirmed, minor vulnerability in Curl (but I don't think they have said what it was?). In another system that used Curl it's possible it could have exploited that vulnerability to chain to another, bigger vulnerability that was normally inaccessible. That's how systems get broken. 'Mythos “broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours.”' And the government's response was to limit access to US citizens? I don't believe this for a minute. If Mythos could actually break into all these systems, the government would declare it a national security risk and it would never see the light of day for anyone outside government staff with security clearance. additional context from the article regarding that particular statement: "[the statement] was oversimplified... In reality, the tests involved “red teams” of N.S.A. analysts who were using Mythos in a highly tailored environment that would be extremely unlikely for an adversary to replicate, officials said. The red teams began their tests within classified N.S.A. systems designed to be accessible only from certain computers and completely cut off from the broader internet. The tests found that Mythos was able to identify cybersecurity flaws within that classified network quickly, but it did not actually break into those systems, the officials said." >> The curl experience does not suggest that hysteria is warranted, but this gives me pause. What about the Firefox experience? Or are we conveniently ignoring things that don't confirm conclusions we've already reached? I'm not as familiar with that. I do agree that it sounded substantial. I just think that a coreutils flaw is not as substantial as a rendering engine exploit. Hadn't they spent a year hardening curl with various AI before they tried Mythos? Yes. The original curl post didn't say anything like "mythos sucks" but rather "it's only a minor improvement in comparison to already widely used models". Yes, and Firefox had not. Which I think points at Mythos not being some big jump in capability finding things earlier LLMs didn't, it seems to mostly come down to massively increased compute budget and they finally catching up in context sizes. mythos allowed mediocre people to get results by holding their hand through the process, or just ignoring their irrelevant input and knowing what to do. if you throw millions of tokens at IDA Pro MCP with the right prompt lets just say security by obscurity fails miserably because there is no obscurity when the LLM chews through the decompilation. It isn’t bad, it isn’t good. It’s just how the world looks now. All software is open source now, some of it is just more open, some of it is less. > law enforcement wasn’t able to keep up with those people Law enforcement is almost irrelevant to cause and effect. Enforcing laws between jurisdictions mostly requires military or heavy economic incentives. >mythos allowed mediocre people to get results by holding their hand through the process Isn't this what technology progress looks like? Industrial tools allowed mediocre people to improve their productivity by orders of magnitude which is how we managed(in the past) to build so many amazing things with less human toil and suffering than previous generations. Progress isn't always welcome by the incumbent who have built their moats on hoarding knowledge over being adaptable It seems like AI is really hurting the people who don't have a hoard of experience - the juniors and early mid-level tech people. The incumbents with experience are doing amazing. PM's with Mythos aren't replacing the PE with 20 years of experiences lol. I mean that is what most technology looked like at first too. Oh okay. So where's the point where AI starts to encourage the development of a new useful skill set among people early in their careers? Are you saying programmers aren't adaptable? I don't think I've ever seen this field pause to take a breath. Not all of us think encouraging people to outsource their own thinking to proprietary models is actually "progress." > mythos allowed mediocre people to get results by holding their hand through the process, Yes, just like early cars allowed mediocre horse riders to get from A to B with dignity. Or like my Japanese rice cooker allows a person like me, utterly shitty at preparing this, to eat some rice that is cooked to perfection. Etc. I mean, the calculator is my go to analogy I keep bringing up in this debate. It lets someone with mediocre long division skills to just do the thing they need to do with fewer steps and less friction. IDA itself is a tool that helps you decompile code without having to do a lot of things. knowing long division does not help you make the calculator do division better. Understanding math absolutely makes a calculator more useful to you though. and if you work that into the parent's analogy you get the point I was making Apologies. I misread the comment to which you replied and gave them unwarranted credit for not making the same tired point about calculators. Should mediocre people be preforming heart surgery? It depends. Mediocre doctor in a remote area with right tooling assistance as opposed to no one being available for someone who urgently needs one? Yeah this should be a thing.
Should a software bro in NY perform it in dark alley despite having best doctors few blocks away? Maybe not… I'm sure many 'mediocre' people perform heart surgery. Only 100 years ago, the idea of a person without a certain surname or race, would've been a ghastly preposition, no? Do you... think heart surgery has become LESS dependent on surgical skill in the last 100 years? Cardiovascular surgeons spend MORE time in training now than they did 100 years ago. Did heart surgery as we know it exist 100 years ago, or are you trying to conflate things to make a point? "heart surgery" isn't a technique". Name something, literally anything connected to the profession, and tell me whether the training time is naturally bound to keep going up and up. "mediocre people" I'm glad to see the mask is falling off the privileged caste. Is there anything inherently wrong about open access to tools? (Apart from rent payments). The "privileged caste" being people who actually expended the effort to learn things for themselves? And such people learnt everything from the beginning? From fire? Where's the cut off point of where learning something for yourself becomes the signal for entrance to the enlightened caste? > (Apart from rent payments). Privilege enables you to rent competence, historically by paying other people. The slop companies will now sell you a simulacrum of competence by the token. The fact that competence can (could?) only be acquired through sustained effort over a long period of time is (was?) levelling the field. Selling simulated competence perpetuates privilege, instead of dismantling it like you seem to claim. Is there a historical precedent as to what happened when the upstart denied capability to the empire? The closest I can think of is the bronze age collapse. There is no consensus on what caused the bronze age collapse. Perhaps, but I think volcanic eruption followed by system collapse is very compelling. Here is the story I find most convincing from the experts whose works I have read. It likely started with a volcanic eruption, leading to widespread famine. Those in western Europe who didn't want to starve migrated en masse, as whole families, becoming the sea peoples. The powerful empires struggled to feed their people, and many were destroyed by the forced migration from the sea peoples. Egypt barely survived, but only as a shadow of itself. Many of the others were destroyed by those who had survived on marginal lands and didn't need complex societies to keep themselves fed. Iron can't be the cause, as iron weapons pre-existed the Bronze Age collapse. I think the evidence is stronger that the collapse forced widespread adoption. The collapse devastated long-distance trade networks, which cut off the supplies of tin needed to make bronze. The scarcity pushed people to rapidly improve iron smelting. I'm not a professional historian, but I do find the topic interesting. We should try to learn from past disasters to prevent repetition. See Eric H. Cline's
"1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed"; Epimethius video "What was life like after the bronze age collapse (extended version)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM6JSS3l-IQ What's the time period between iron being widespread and the so-called collapse? Thenn, it makes it more riveting when modern day phenonema happen, surely? Unless you subscribe to a historical channel? Sorry i forgot to ask. What are the top 5 theories, and do you see any modern parallels? Are you an AI? > The closest I can think of is the bronze age collapse. No idea about your question, but I'd love to hear more about this part. > That contract has not been finalized, and some Pentagon officials want the N.S.A. to find a way to work with other models. Good, fsck NSA, that's the last organization I'd ever want to have access to Mythos. I hope this administration's incompetence will prevent them from regaining access for as long as possible It’ll be the first organization to get access to Epic/Saga/Legend/Bible/Torah/Sutra/Vedan/whatever the Mythos+1 is called - and it might be the only one with this privilege More likely they'll convince congress they will need their own. Only it will 20-200 times more expensive and the US taxpayer will be paying for it but won't get access. That would meet the OP's goal of NSA never getting a frontier model, "behind schedule" is the natural partner of "over budget". They will never be able to read all the words in my head that spell out exactly what I want to have happen at that org. AI marketing bullshit stunts are unlike anything I've seen in 30 years. It started with MS Copilot so called capabilities for work, which were completely made up use cases that didn't work at all (3 years later still). We've had OpenAI "AGI is coming" and "AI will take your job", now we have Mythos being so "dangerous" for cybersecurity, which of course makes the average Joe interpret it as Anthropic being "the better overall company, the NSA uses it!!". I mean gov foes with Anthropic are probably true, but the marketing is to blame not Mythos capabilities. This is all so fucking pathetic > and "AI will take your job" Don't forget, its no longer cool to say that now that the public has pushed back. The fact they all changed their tone away from taking jobs tells you that it was all just entirely marketing. All the CEOs very quickly changed their messaging after Altman's house got molotoved. Seems to me that they were mostly right, and the message was received by the right people. No need to ensure it gets distributed to the wrong people. I haven’t heard anything about AGI in a long while. Oh yeah, and per conversations last Jan we were all supposed to be out of our jobs by now. I'm just glad there are so many jobs. Just look at the latest unemployment numbers! I wonder if this era of peace and prosperity will be remembered as the peak of humanity? And did you see that chocolate rations increased again last month! It's literally incredible. I was able to identify, diagnose, fix, and upstream a minor bug in and erlang/OTP ssh key implementation with Opus in maybe 20 minutes (+2 weeks or so for upstream). It is not impossible that I could have done this before, but it would have taken days or weeks. The actual fix was about 2 lines of code, hardly AI slop, but getting there would have been quite the slog, and I never would have done it. There is a lot of the reason for AI skepticism out there, but people tend to do massive overcorrections and underestimate the force multiplier it can be, particularly for people with some idea of what they're doing and a good grasp of how to take advantage of the tool. I said absolutely nothing about LLMs, which is a fantastic tool I'm using every day. I'm talking about marketing. So let’s say you’re in Anthropic’s shoes. You see that LLM’s are getting better and better, and it’s very possible that they will have some impact on jobs in the next few years, and a very meaningful impact on cybersecurity. Is it more ethical to stay silent about these concerns, as you might have a bit of self interest? Or even if it looks a bit self interested, is it better to warn people ahead of time? I think the latter is obviously the better position. Are we really saying that Anthropic claiming AI would take over industries was some benevolent ethical move rather than marketing their product as a cheap replacement for human labor that works in any industry? Wouldn't the ethical thing, if they were actually concerned about labor displacement, be to shut down the lab and work to disrupt and disable other labs instead? Oppenheimer believed that technological progress is inevitable: if something can be built it will be. Anthropic (and Deepmind, and some at OpenAI) believe the same thing. Their ethical argument is: 1) This technology is coming whether or not our company does it or not. 2) Strong AI needs to be under human control, and we are the best placed to develop techniques to make this happen. To be very clear: Anthropic (at least) is very happy to restrict access to their best models. They have continually campaigned for regulation to make sure others have to do the same. > Wouldn't the ethical thing, if they were actually concerned about labor displacement, be to shut down the lab and work to disrupt and disable other labs instead Personally I strongly reject the idea that labor displacement is unethical. It will be a serious problem to deal with, but that doesn't make it unethical. The steam engine displaced labor. That doesn't make it unethical. > Personally I strongly reject the idea that labor displacement is unethical. Oh, well if you STRONGLY reject it I guess that's it. > It will be a serious problem to deal with, but that doesn't make it unethical. What WOULD make it unethical? > The steam engine displaced labor. That doesn't make it unethical. The steam engine also created new jobs to replace what it eliminated. It wasn't a mostly one-sided wealth transfer to the elite. > The steam engine also created new jobs to replace what it eliminated. It wasn't a mostly one-sided wealth transfer to the elite. Indeed. You make my point for me. What are those to be created jobs going to be doing that AI won't be able to? There's two big differences with the steam machine: this change is happening much faster so society has much less time to adapt, and it's got a much wider scope. Steam machines only replaced a small category of jobs. Was it more ethical for the boy who cried wolf to have cried wolf so many times that nobody believed him when a wolf finally did show up? Be specific, what are you talking about. Industry has been continuously warning about many of the complex problems that are going to happen as a clear consequence of the technology. I don’t know of any problem they have talked about that hasn’t either already come to fruition in one sense or another or that just hasn’t yet arrived. Dario has been predicting the end of coding for a long time now and look where we already are. So yea no it’s more like it’s important for industry leaders and those closest to model development to proactively identify the issues that they don’t have complete control over or that we don’t have a regulatory framework for. Super puzzling to see these comments and of course with zero specifics just “they’re all liars and grifters” I'm talking about the breathless alarmism that Dario and his company push out as a marketing strategy. They've given us such gems as these: - "It’s a bit like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea" (from the company that can't go more than a day or two without serious downtime) - "We are releasing a model that is too powerful for the public" - "It would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development." - "I believe that biological risks may soon follow, and that serious AI autonomy risks may not be far behind." You can fill my ear with nitpicks about there still being time for these cries of wolf to be born out, but be prepared for me to wax philosophical about all things being possible given an eternal timescale. > Dario has been predicting the end of coding for a long time now and look where we already are. Where? It seems exceedingly unlikely that developers have all been phased out while I wasn't looking, as Dario prognosticated. And even if they all up and disappeared, AI still hasn't found a toehold outside of the relatively niche market of agentic coding. I think that Anthropic is fully absolutely unethical. And they lied a lot. They were actively trying to make the doom happen while trying to cash out maximally on doom trolling. If they were actually concerned over social impact, they would try to minimize it. They could have sell their product as a tool to be used to make economy boom, they tried to sell it on promiss to make it shrink for most people. It really does not matter how much they believed own doom predictions, because they were actively trying to make them true whether realistic or not. Economic growth and short-term job loss are both results of automation. Anthropic seems to have been pretty honest about that to me? If only they wrote in normal calm economic terms as you seem to imply ... and I wrote "shrinking economy for most people" not growing. > They were actively trying to make the doom happen while trying to cash out maximally on doom trolling. These words make no sense. Anthropic delayed mythos/fable rollout. A mythos model without safeguards would have been a pretty bad idea, and they sacrificed a ton of revenue and risked being scooped by any of the other labs in the meantime. Frontier models are only frontier temporarily until the next lab releases their model. Of course they are a company and need to act in their own best interest. It is also clearly serious the problems we need to think about as we march quickly towards even more capable systems. Why on earth is it a problem to point this out? > If they were actually concerned over social impact, they would try to minimize it. They could have sell their product as a tool to be used to make economy boom, they tried to sell it on promiss to make it shrink for most people. What a really weird take; they employ some of the best safety and alignment teams in the industry and this is an active area of research that they are campaigning for more attention on. You complain about them “doom trolling” and then complain they don’t do anything about…the doom? No sense at all. It is perfectly consistent to (1) sound an alarm and (2) March full steam ahead as quickly as they can. If they don’t do (1) that’s unethical. If they don’t do (2) someone else will. I would rather someone like Dario align these models than the CCC. Plus it would be nice not to have a war over Taiwan which is inevitable if China gains enough of the upper hand in this AI race. The issue is both OpenAI and Anthropic have lied so many times that it’s no longer rational to take anything they say at face value. Also: they don’t have to know they’re lying to say things that aren’t true. There is definitely some cult-like behaviour at the moment on the west coast Be specific, what do you consider their lies to be? Also, this is pretty straightforward. You have a decade of extremely stable and predictable performance trajectory. It’s easy to see the writing on the wall. You can feel whatever which way about their motivations and ethics but if you read say Dario’s raw words they are pretty reasonable. We have to have a good regulatory framework and do what we can to prepare ourselves while also not ceding a critical strategic advantage. The west coast is always cult like, that’s not new. And it ignores the very real substance to the discussion. Every year since 2023 the models are too dangerous to release and in 12 months all white collar jobs will be obsolete. This might not have been a deliberate lie but it's clearly been untrue and they've said it again and again. Predictions with wrong timing are frankly worthless. I predict at some point in the future the S&P 500 will be at 10,000. Of course I'm guaranteed to be right. But have I really predicted anything useful? If Dario was really worried about protecting the sheep, he wouldn't cry wolf every five minutes because everyone knows that's the worst possible thing to do. And if you want to ask if Altman is trustworthy... ask Satya Nadella or anyone else who's ever made the mistake of doing business with him > Every year since 2023 the models are too dangerous to release and in 12 months all white collar jobs will be obsolete. This might not have been a deliberate lie but it's clearly been untrue and they've said it again and again. How is a prediction a lie? Did they tell you "this will definitely happen in X time"? Their speculation is not only valuable (they are the closest to the technology) but also necessary (they need to buy long term compute contracts so these predictions are literally what they have to bet their real money and company success on). They have said again and again that this will make an incredible amount of tasks obsolete, and they are of course right about this. The models _are_ dangerous to release, every time we hit the frontier. This has become _increasingly true_. > Predictions with wrong timing are frankly worthless. Who cares? > I predict at some point in the future the S&P 500 will be at 10,000. Of course I'm guaranteed to be right. But have I really predicted anything useful? You aren't cherry picking and strawmanning here? Should we have a tour of all of the things that have indeed been predicted well and already come to fruition? Was 2025 "the year of agents"? It very much was, wasn't it? Additionally, unlike the S&P, performance trajectory, for almost a decade, is incredibly stable and predictable. It's hard to know, a priori for a given task or category of tasks, what specific error rate will trigger a phase transition but it's absolutely obvious and clear that this will happen quickly. It has indeed happened quickly. Does 2026 coding look anything remotely like 2024? > If Dario was really worried about protecting the sheep, he wouldn't cry wolf every five minutes because everyone knows that's the worst possible thing to do. No you're right he would make well reasoned arguments for the types of problems we need to address urgently. Hmm...that feels pretty ethical. > If Dario was really worried about protecting the sheep, he wouldn't cry wolf every five minutes because everyone knows that's the worst possible thing to do. I don't feel either of them are trustworthy, they are CEOs acting in their companies best interest. But people suggesting Mythos delay was some sort of PR ploy is some of the most extreme mental gymnastics I've seen. I listen to the actual words spoken by these people and consider the hard data that is in abundance at this point. I listen to the large body of research on alignment and safety and measurement that anyone can read for themselves or use AI agents to digest for them. I’ve just watched enough old Adam Curtis documentaries to know historically how these things always end, true believers in many dead ends have exactly this kind of zeal. Very smart people, reasoned arguments, “science”, all wrong. But maybe this time will be different
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