From assistants to adversaries

ANTHROPIC'S DECISION TO WITHHOLD MYTHOS SIGNALS THAT OUR PREPARATION TIME FOR SUCH TECH IS FINITE

- SIDDHARTH PAI Technology consultant and venture capitalist By invitation

HE LARGE LANGUAGE model (LLM) was supposed to be an assistant. We expected a tool that would tidy up prose, summarise the sludge of corporate reports, and perhaps produce serviceable computer code.

For a moment, that seemed like the ceiling. Executives glimpsed a way to speed up the treadmill without changing the machine. That assumption is now breaking. We are moving away from systems that help and toward software that operates.

Take Anthropic’s Claude Mythos AI, supposedly withheld because it is “too powerful” and can cause a cybersecurity catastrophe. If you insist on viewing artificial intelligence (AI) as a conversational interface, you have already missed the point. Its significance lies not in what it says, but in what it does. It does not merely suggest how a system might be compromised; it attempts the compromise.

The sceptics in the security community—those who have spent decades in offensive security—argue that none of this is new. They say all we are seeing is a sophisticated PR exercise. A skilled human attacker can already execute these sequences with more creativity and intuition than any current model. To them, a system like Mythos looks like a faster script, another tool in an already crowded arsenal. If a human can already find the zero-day or social-engineer the administrator, why does this shift matter?

The answer lies in the movement from the artisanal to the industrial. A human attacker, no matter how gifted, isa constrained resource. They are limited by attention, by fatigue, and by the scarcity of their own expertise. You cannot replicate a top-tier exploit developer at will. A model, however, can be copied.