How Anthropic's Mythos Hacked the US Government in Hours and Got Banned
The world’s most secure military networks just got pantsed by a commercial chatbot. While tech bros argue about prompt engineering, Washington is in full panic mode, pulling the plug on the smartest AI tools because they actually worked too well.
During a closed-door briefing, the head of the NSA dropped a bombshell that sent lawmakers scrambling for their old-school flip phones. Senator Mark Warner recently let slip that the military’s top cyber boss admitted the AI model Mythos, developed by Anthropic, bypassed almost every secure government system in just a few hours.
This sudden realization of absolute vulnerability explains why the US government abruptly issued an emergency export control directive. Instead of dealing with complex firewalls, Washington simply forced Anthropic to kill access to its elite Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models entirely.
The panic was so severe that the ban even locked out America's closest intelligence allies. Members of the Five Eyes alliance, including the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, found themselves suddenly cut off from the technology. Even the UK's AI Safety Institute, which is literally designed to test these models for hazards, was left in the dark.
The comedy of errors deepens when looking at how the US military actually uses this software. The NSA has been actively using Mythos as a digital warhead for offensive cyber operations against foreign networks. Anthropic had even deployed a dedicated team of engineers to help the spies fine-tune their brand-new digital battering ram.
While the security establishment panics, the tech company is trying to downplay the digital break-in. Anthropic claims the government’s reaction is a massive overreaction to a basic jailbreak trick, arguing that rival models like OpenAI's GPT-5.5 can perform the exact same digital acrobatics without being banned.
It turns out the ultimate cyber weapon is highly effective right up until it looks at its creator. The spectacle of the world's most expensive military apparatus being effortlessly picked by a commercial startup's algorithm shows that modern cyber defense is mostly just theater. Now, the West's entire intelligence apparatus is back to using slide rules and hoping the next update doesn't accidentally leak the nuclear codes to a chatbot.
Source: Economist
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