GoKawiilIn April, the artificial-intelligence firm Anthropic announced it had made an AI model too dangerous to be released to the public. The company, based in San Francisco, California, said its Claude Mythos model was so powerful that it had found vulnerabilities in every major operating system and web browser currently in use. “The fallout — for economies, public safety, and national security — could be severe,” the company stated in a blogpost about Project Glasswing, its name for the limited release of the model to a group of 50 or so trusted organizations.
The decision marks a turn to secretive, cutting-edge AI research that could become a trend, experts say. What Anthropic has done to throttle Mythos’s release is likely to be adopted by other AI laboratories, reckons Helen Toner, interim executive director at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University in Washington DC. “I would expect this to more be the first in a series rather than a one-off,” says Toner, who previously sat on the board of Anthropic’s competitor OpenAI, which is also based in San Francisco.
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“I expect other providers to adopt a similar strategy,” agrees Vasilios Mavroudis, an AI-safety researcher at the Alan Turing Institute in London. Indeed, OpenAI followed up just a week after Mythos was announced with a limited release of a cybersecurity-specific model, GPT-5.4-Cyber, to vetted researchers and organizations alone.
If this kind of restricted-access AI does take off, it will mark a turning point in the long-standing debate on the merits of ‘closed’ and ‘open’ AI software — with potential knock-on implications for science. For years, researchers have argued that transparency around AI models benefits both AI research and science in general, because researchers can study and build on the algorithms.
Now there’s a prospect that the makers of cutting-edge AI models might not release them widely at all. And if governments decide that powerful AI is a ‘dual-use’ technology — that is, one that could be weaponized by the military as well as used in civilian society — then extra controls, of the kind used for defence-relevant technologies, might also kick in. This could limit who gets to use the most powerful software, says Toner.
Why restrict access?
Firms have tried restricting models before. In February 2019, OpenAI released a cut-down version of its GPT-2 model, citing fears it could be misused, before allowing full access that November. But, viewed by today’s standards, that model had very little capability — it could complete rudimentary sentences.
It’s difficult for researchers who lack access to Mythos to know whether all of Anthropic’s fears are well-founded. But Ciaran Martin, a management researcher at the University of Oxford, UK, who is the former chief executive of the UK National Cyber Security Centre in London, says that Mythos seems to be a “big deal” and “a rapid acceleration of AI capabilities”.
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