Axios reports the National Security Agency uses Anthropic Mythos model despite Department of Defense concerns, blurring AI risk vs defense lines.

The reported use of Anthropic’s Mythos model by the U.S. National Security Agency is a reminder that the line between AI as a defensive tool and AI as a security risk is getting harder to draw. According to Axios, the NSA is already using Mythos Preview even while the Department of Defense has formally treated Anthropic as a supply-chain risk and pushed to cut ties with the company.

“The National Security Agency is using Anthropic’s most powerful model yet, Mythos Preview, despite top officials at the Department of Defense — which oversees the NSA — insisting the company is a “supply chain risk,” two sources tell Axios.”

That tension captures a larger reality: governments want the most capable cybersecurity tools available, even when those tools raise concerns about misuse, governance, and strategic dependence.

Mythos is considered sensitive not just because it’s a powerful AI model, but because it’s especially strong in cybersecurity. Access is limited due to concerns it could be misused for attacks. At the same time, it’s useful for finding vulnerabilities, making it both a helpful defense tool and a potential risk—highlighting a key tension in AI security.

“Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei met White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Friday to discuss the use of Mythos within government and Anthropic’s wider plans and security practices.” continues Axios. “Sources said next steps after the meeting were expected to focus on how departments other than the Pentagon engage with the model. Both sides described the meeting as productive.”

The NSA story also highlights a basic policy problem: agencies can criticize a vendor in public or in court while still relying on the same vendor’s technology in practice. Reuters reported the Axios claims, while other outlets noted that the UK’s AI Security Institute also has access to Mythos. This suggests that the real competition is not only between governments and AI companies, but also between procurement caution and operational urgency. When cyber defense demands speed, stability, and scale, the newest model can become too valuable to ignore.

Anthropic says Claude Mythos is a major leap beyond its Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus models, introducing a new top tier called Copybara. It stands out for strong agentic coding and reasoning skills, achieving top scores in software tasks and enabling advanced cybersecurity capabilities.

Project Glasswing is a joint effort led by Anthropic with major tech and security firms (Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorganChase, Linux Foundation, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Palo Alto Networks) to protect critical software using advanced AI.

It leverages Claude Mythos Preview, a powerful model capable of finding and exploiting vulnerabilities at a level beyond most humans.

The goal is to use these capabilities defensively, helping organizations detect and fix flaws before attackers can exploit them. Anthropic is sharing access with partners and funding the initiative to strengthen both proprietary and open-source software security.

Glasswing brings together major tech and security companies to use Mythos defensively, helping secure critical software and infrastructure. Anthropic plans to limit access for now, hoping to improve global cybersecurity before such powerful tools become widely available.

Modern software underpins critical systems like banking, healthcare, energy, and government, but it has always contained vulnerabilities—some severe enough to enable cyberattacks, data theft, and disruption. These threats are already costly and widespread, with global cybercrime estimated at around $500 billion annually and often driven by state-backed actors.

With advanced AI models like Claude Mythos, the effort and expertise needed to find and exploit flaws has dropped sharply. These models can identify long-hidden vulnerabilities and develop sophisticated exploits, sometimes outperforming human experts. This raises serious risks, as attacks could become faster, more frequent, and more damaging.

However, the same capabilities can be used defensively. Initiatives like Project Glasswing aim to harness AI to detect and fix vulnerabilities at scale, helping secure critical infrastructure. The challenge now is to deploy these tools responsibly and quickly, ensuring defenders stay ahead in an AI-driven cybersecurity landscape.

Anthropic is investing $100M in usage credits and funding open-source security projects, while sharing findings to improve industry-wide defenses. The initiative aims to expand collaboration across tech, security, and governments to develop best practices and strengthen cybersecurity in the AI era.

For governments, the immediate lesson is uncomfortable but straightforward. They need strong AI tools to defend networks, but they also need procurement rules, audit trails, and usage boundaries that keep those tools from becoming opaque dependencies. The Pentagon’s feud with Anthropic shows what happens when those boundaries are not aligned. If an agency says a vendor is too risky for broad use but still wants the model for its own missions, the issue is no longer just technical. It becomes one of trust, accountability, and national strategy.

In the end, the NSA–Anthropic story is less about one model and more about the future of cyber power. The organizations that can safely deploy frontier AI will move faster in defense, but they will also face greater pressure to justify how these tools are controlled. Mythos may be a glimpse of what’s coming: a world where the most capable cyber systems are also the most contested, and where operational need often outruns policy comfort.

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Pierluigi Paganini(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Claude Mythos)

Wired writes (alternate source):

Security researchers at Google on Tuesday released a report describing what they’re calling “Coruna,” a highly sophisticated iPhone hacking toolkit that includes five complete hacking techniques capable of bypassing all the defenses of an iPhone to silently install malware on a device when it visits a website containing the exploitation code. In total, Coruna takes advantage of 23 distinct vulnerabilities in iOS, a rare collection of hacking components that suggests it was created by a well-resourced, likely state-sponsored group of hackers...

The post Possible US Government iPhone Hacking Tool Leaked appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Wired writes (alternate source):

Security researchers at Google on Tuesday released a report describing what they’re calling “Coruna,” a highly sophisticated iPhone hacking toolkit that includes five complete hacking techniques capable of bypassing all the defenses of an iPhone to silently install malware on a device when it visits a website containing the exploitation code. In total, Coruna takes advantage of 23 distinct vulnerabilities in iOS, a rare collection of hacking components that suggests it was created by a well-resourced, likely state-sponsored group of hackers.

[…]

Coruna’s code also appears to have been originally written by English-speaking coders, notes iVerify’s cofounder Rocky Cole. “It’s highly sophisticated, took millions of dollars to develop, and it bears the hallmarks of other modules that have been publicly attributed to the US government,” Cole tells WIRED. “This is the first example we’ve seen of very likely US government tools­based on what the code is telling us­spinning out of control and being used by both our adversaries and cybercriminal groups.”

TechCrunch reports that Coruna is definitely of US origin:

Two former employees of government contractor L3Harris told TechCrunch that Coruna was, at least in part, developed by the company’s hacking and surveillance tech division, Trenchant. The two former employees both had knowledge of the company’s iPhone hacking tools. Both spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to talk about their work for the company.

It’s always super interesting to see what malware looks like when it’s created through a professional software development process. And the TechCrunch article has some speculation as to how the US lost control of it. It seems that an employee of L3Harris’s surviellance tech division, Trenchant, sold it to the Russian government.

Sen. Ron Wyden is warning us of an abuse of Section 702:

Wyden took to the Senate floor to deliver a lengthy speech, ostensibly about the since approved (with support of many Democrats) nomination of Joshua Rudd to lead the NSA. Wyden was protesting that nomination, but in the context of Rudd being unwilling to agree to basic constitutional limitations on NSA surveillance. But that’s just a jumping off point ahead of Section 702’s upcoming reauthorization deadline. Buried in the speech is a passage that should set off every alarm bell:

There’s another example of secret law related to Section 702, one that directly affects the privacy rights of Americans. For years, I have asked various administrations to declassify this matter. Thus far they have all refused, although I am still waiting for a response from DNI Gabbard. I strongly believe that this matter can and should be declassified and that Congress needs to debate it openly before Section 702 is reauthorized. In fact, ...

The post Sen. Wyden Warns of Another Section 702 Abuse appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Sen. Ron Wyden is warning us of an abuse of Section 702:

Wyden took to the Senate floor to deliver a lengthy speech, ostensibly about the since approved (with support of many Democrats) nomination of Joshua Rudd to lead the NSA. Wyden was protesting that nomination, but in the context of Rudd being unwilling to agree to basic constitutional limitations on NSA surveillance. But that’s just a jumping off point ahead of Section 702’s upcoming reauthorization deadline. Buried in the speech is a passage that should set off every alarm bell:

There’s another example of secret law related to Section 702, one that directly affects the privacy rights of Americans. For years, I have asked various administrations to declassify this matter. Thus far they have all refused, although I am still waiting for a response from DNI Gabbard. I strongly believe that this matter can and should be declassified and that Congress needs to debate it openly before Section 702 is reauthorized. In fact, when it is eventually declassified, the American people will be stunned that it took so long and that Congress has been debating this authority with insufficient information.

Over the decades, we have learned to take Wyden’s warnings seriously.

Em uma onda crescente de ameaças cibernéticas sofisticadas contra o setor industrial, os ataques de ransomware aumentaram 46% do quarto trimestre de 2024 para o primeiro trimestre de 2025, de acordo com o novo Relatório de Ameaças à Segurança Cibernética de 2025 da Honeywell (Nasdaq: HON). A pesquisa também constatou que tanto malware quanto ransomware aumentaram significativamente nesse período, incluindo um aumento de 3.000% no uso de um trojan projetado para roubar credenciais de operadores industriais.

“Operações industriais em setores críticos como energia e manufatura devem evitar, tanto quanto possível, paradas não planejadas – e é exatamente por isso que são alvos tão atraentes para ransomware”, disse Paul Smith, diretor de Engenharia de Cibersegurança da Honeywell Operational Technology (OT), autor do relatório. “Esses invasores estão evoluindo rapidamente, utilizando kits de ransomware como serviço para comprometer as operações industriais que mantêm nossa economia em movimento.”

A Agência de Segurança Cibernética e de Infraestrutura (CISA) dos Estados Unidos define incidentes como substanciais se eles permitirem acesso não autorizado, levando a paradas ou prejuízos operacionais significativos. Relatórios do setor mostram que paradas não planejadas, causadas por ataques de segurança cibernética e outros problemas, como falhas de equipamentos, custam às empresas da Fortune 500 aproximadamente US$ 1,5 trilhão anualmente, o que representa 11% de sua receita.

Para desenvolver o relatório, os pesquisadores da Honeywell analisaram mais de 250 bilhões de logs, 79 milhões de arquivos e 4.600 eventos de incidentes bloqueados em toda a base global de instalações da empresa, descobrindo:

• Ransomware ainda em ascensão: 2.472 ataques potenciais de ransomware foram documentados no primeiro trimestre de 2025, o que representa 40% do total anual de 2024.
• Trojans explorando acesso industrial: Um trojan perigoso direcionado a sistemas de TO – W32.Worm.Ramnit – foi responsável por 37% dos arquivos bloqueados pelo Secure Media Exchange (SMX) da Honeywell. Essa descoberta aponta para um aumento de 3.000% no número de trojans em comparação com o trimestre anterior.
• Ameaças baseadas em USB persistem: 1.826 ameaças USB exclusivas foram detectadas via SMX no primeiro trimestre de 2025, com 124 ameaças nunca antes vistas – indicando um risco persistente via mídia externa e dispositivos USB. Isso se baseou em um aumento de 33% nas detecções de malware USB em 2023, após um aumento de 700% em relação ao ano anterior em 2022.

O relatório expandiu sua análise para incluir ameaças transmitidas por meio de hardware plug-in adicional – conhecido como Dispositivo de Interface Humana (HID) – incluindo mouses, cabos de carregamento para dispositivos móveis, laptops e outros periféricos frequentemente usados na atualização ou aplicação de patches de software para sistemas locais.

“Com ameaças cada vez mais significativas e regulamentações de relatórios da SEC atualizadas exigindo a divulgação de incidentes materiais de segurança cibernética, os operadores industriais devem agir de forma decisiva para mitigar o tempo de inatividade não planejado e os riscos dispendiosos, incluindo aqueles relacionados à segurança”, disse Smith. “Aproveitar a arquitetura Zero Trust e a IA para análise de segurança pode acelerar a detecção e permitir uma tomada de decisão mais inteligente e uma defesa proativa em um cenário digital cada vez mais complexo.”