This superintelligent AI is so powerful, even its creators are afraid of what it’s capable of

April 10, 2026 — 10:23am

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Normally, right now, I would be writing about the geopolitical implications of the war with Iran, and I am sure I will again soon. But I want to interrupt that thought to highlight a stunning advance in artificial intelligence – one that arrived sooner than expected and that will have equally profound geopolitical implications.

The AI company Anthropic announced this week that it was releasing the newest generation of its large language model, dubbed Claude Mythos Preview, but to only a limited consortium of roughly 40 technology companies, including Google, Broadcom, Nvidia, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft, and JPMorganChase. Some of its competitors are among these partners because this new AI model represents a “step change” in performance that has some critically important positive and negative implications for cybersecurity and America’s national security.

The good news is that Anthropic discovered in the process of developing Claude Mythos that the AI could not only write software code more easily and with greater complexity than any model currently available, but as a byproduct of that capability, it could also find vulnerabilities in virtually all of the world’s most popular software systems more easily than before.

The bad news is that if this tool falls into the hands of bad actors, they could hack pretty much every major software system in the world, including all those made by the companies in the consortium.

This is not a publicity stunt. In the run-up to this announcement, representatives of leading tech companies have been in private conversation with the Trump administration about the implications for the security of the United States and all the other countries that use these........

© The Sydney Morning Herald