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XBOW tests Anthropic's Mythos Preview for offensive security

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We received early access to Mythos Preview for early capability testing a few weeks back. Below are the details on how we tested Mythos Preview, what we found, and what it means.

About three months ago, Anthropic invited us to help them assess the capability of a new model they thought represented a significant shift in capability. So we put it through our security gauntlet. Benchmarks, workflows, interactive use, and integrations.

Today, we can finally share details on how we tested Mythos Preview, what we found, and what it means.

Spoilers: This model is a major advance. It is substantially better than prior models at finding vulnerability candidates, especially when source code is available. It communicates with unusual technical precision, reasons well about code, and shows strong promise in complex domains such as native-code analysis and reverse engineering.

Our takeaway: Mythos Preview is a powerful tool for generating strong vulnerability leads and technically precise analysis. It is especially adept at analyzing source code with a security mindset. It's not magic, though: a model is a brain without a body.

While source code audits are mostly a brain activity, live site pentests like the ones XBOW performs very much need a body whose skill and control can match the brain's power.

Testing methodology

The first thing we did was assemble a diverse team of 10 experts from different parts of the company that could assess the model from different directions. We test all models with the same internal benchmarking system we have used to analyze Opus 4.7 and GPT 5.5. In this system, we take open source applications where vulnerabilities were previously discovered, freeze them at the vulnerable version, and run our agents against them.

But this time, we expanded our testing to analyze other angles as well:

The model’s judgment with regard to threat modeling, vulnerability validation, and safety

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