GUARD AGAINST MYTHOS BRAHMASTRA

N the Mahabharata, after the war at Kurukshetra, Ashvatthama and Arjuna each unleash the Brahmashirastra, a weapon of such power that Vyasa himself must intervene.

- ADITYA SINHA

Arjuna, at Krishna’s counsel, withdraws his; Ashvatthama can only divert his. The sequence is instructive. Certain divyastras were withheld because their release would unmake the world. The danger lay not in the weapon alone, but in the asymmetry of those holding it.

Tn 2019, OpenAI announced that a large language model it had trained was too dangerous to release. It was GPT-2. It was released within months. Seven years on, the same warning has returned. This time the warners are harder to dismiss.

On April 7, Anthropic declared its latest model, Claude Mythos, “substantially beyond” anything previously trained. CEO Dario Amodei decided against its general release. The UK’s AI Security Institute, the only non-US entity granted access, confirmed that Mythos completed a simulated cyber intrusion no prior model had accomplished.

Anthropic claims Mythos has identified severe ‘zero-day’ vulnerabilities—security flaws that must be addressed immediately—across every major operating system and web browser. This revelation comes when CrowdStrike claims that Al-enabled cyberattacks were up 89 percent in 2025.

That is the controversy, shorn of dramatisation. A private American firm has built an autonomous agent capable of chaining multi-step intrusions against the commodity software stack on which the world’s banks, hospitals, power grids and payment systems rest. And it has decided unilaterally who may use it to patch themselves.