Move over bitcoin and quantum risks. Anthropic’s Mythos AI could have major implications for DeFi

Anthropic has built an AI model that can autonomously find and exploit zero-day software vulnerabilities at a level the company says surpasses decades of human security research and every automated tool in existence.

A closer look at its prowess suggests potential threats to crypto DeFi infrastructure. Let’s start by discussing its capability.

Cracks long-hidden vulnerabilities

Like finding a needle in a million haystacks, the model, Claude Mythos Preview, has a knack for uncovering software bugs that have long eluded human experts.

It found a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD, an operating system built specifically to be hard to hack, for under $50 in compute.

It found a 16-year-old flaw in FFmpeg, the video software that powers most of the internet’s streaming infrastructure, that had been scanned five million times by automated security tools without anyone catching it.

It even wrote a browser exploit that chained four separate vulnerabilities together to break through two layers of security. And it took a publicly known Linux vulnerability and turned it into a full working attack in under a day for under $2,000, a job that would normally take a skilled human researcher weeks.

This has raised alarm bells in tech industry, and rightfully so, as Mythos already exists, is operational, and is uncovering vulnerabilities in code protecting user funds that no human or tool has found in 27 years. This stands in stark contrast to recent fears about quantum computing risks to Bitcoin, which remain largely theoretical.

Why should crypto developers care

The findings that matter most for crypto are in Anthropic’s technical blog, which says Mythos found security flaws in what the company calls ‘the world’s most popular cryptography libraries,’ including TLS, AES-GCM, and SSH. These are critical for internet security, securing HTTPS connections, encrypting data, and allowing developers to remotely access servers that support DeFi and exchange infrastructure.

Flaws or bugs in these could let someone forge certificates or decrypt private communications.

The risk is particularly high for DeFi protocols, which are open source software. Their code is publicly readable by anyone, including a model like Mythos that can autonomously catalog every weakness in a codebase at machine speed for near-zero marginal cost.

And while the roughly $200 billion locked in smart contracts across Ethereum, Solana, and other chains has been audited by humans and automated scanners, Anthropic claims Mythos operates beyond both.

The company noted that “mitigations whose security value comes primarily from friction rather than hard barriers may become considerably weaker against model-assisted adversaries.”

Multisig governance, which requires multiple people to approve a blockchain transaction, timelocks, which delay a transaction for a set period, and audit reports as proof of security are all friction-based defenses. In simple terms, it means that these measures slow things rather than blocking an attack at the code level.

So far, it hasn’t rattled market valuations. The CoinDesk DeFi Select Index has gained 7% in 24 hours, outperforming bitcoin and ether, as the temporary ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran has bolstered risk sentiment. But looking ahead, traders may want to keep an eye not just on macroeconomic factors, but also on developments around Mythos, given its potential implications for software and blockchain security.

All things said, the Mythos model will not be released to the general public yet, and is instead shared with a select bunch of 40 software giants, such as Google, Apple and Microsoft, under ‘Project Glasswing.’

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