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The AI model that can hack anything, and why you can't use it

Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview is their most powerful model ever. It found zero-days in every major OS and browser. They're keeping it locked. Here's what happened.

Ruben Dominguez's avatar
Ruben Dominguez
Apr 08, 2026
∙ Paid

Yesterday OpenAI published a 13-page essay warning about cyber threats and asking the government for help.

Today Anthropic actually fixed them.

On April 7, 2026, Anthropic revealed Claude Mythos Preview, their most powerful model ever. Access is restricted to a small coalition of partners. The reason is simple: it finds and exploits software vulnerabilities better than almost any human security researcher alive.

Bar chart titled "Firefox JS shell exploitation" comparing three Claude models. Sonnet 4.6 shows 4.4% successful exploits. Opus 4.6 shows 14.4% successful exploits. Mythos Preview shows 72.4% successful exploits plus 11.6% register control, totaling over 84% of trials producing meaningful exploit results. Chart uses orange for successful exploits, lighter orange for register control, and grey for failed attempts.
Mythos vs Opus 4.6 vs Sonnet 4.6 on Firefox exploit writing. 181 successes vs 2. Source: Anthropic, April 2026.

In the past few weeks, Mythos found thousands of zero-day bugs, flaws previously unknown to anyone, across every major operating system and every major web browser.

Fully autonomously. One engineer types a paragraph. Mythos does the rest.

The oldest bug it found: a 27-year-old vulnerability in OpenBSD, an operating system literally famous for its security.

The cost of finding it: $50 in compute.

Rather than sit on the model, Anthropic assembled a $100M coalition called Project Glasswing with AWS, Apple, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, CrowdStrike, JPMorgan, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Broadcom, and the Linux Foundation, and pointed Mythos at the world’s most critical software infrastructure to patch it before adversaries find the same bugs.

This is the most important AI story of 2026. Here is everything.


The benchmarks first, because they are hard to believe:

  • SWE-bench Verified: 93.9% vs Opus 4.6’s 80.8%

  • SWE-bench Pro: 77.8% vs 53.4%

  • Terminal-Bench 2.0: 82.0% vs 65.4%

  • USAMO math olympiad: 97.6% vs 42.3% (not a typo)

  • Humanity’s Last Exam (with tools): 64.7% vs 53.1%

  • Firefox exploit writing: 181 successes vs 2 for Opus 4.6

  • Cybench CTF challenges: 100% solve rate

Dark background benchmark comparison chart showing Claude Mythos Preview versus Opus 4.6 across five SWE-bench categories. SWE-bench Pro: 77.8% vs 53.4%. Terminal-Bench 2.0: 82.0% vs 65.4%. SWE-bench Multimodal internal implementation: 59.0% vs 27.1%. SWE-bench Multilingual: 87.3% vs 77.8%. SWE-bench Verified: 93.9% vs 80.8%. Mythos Preview bars are solid white, Opus 4.6 bars are hatched grey
Every SWE-bench category. Every benchmark. Mythos wins by double digits. Source: Anthropic, April 2026.

The gap between these two models is a different era entirely. Opus 4.6 launched roughly two months ago.


What Project Glasswing actually is:

Official Project Glasswing announcement image with dark background showing a fragmented geometric pattern resembling a shattered surface or butterfly wing in dark blue tones on the right side. White text on the left reads "Project Glasswing" in large bold type with the subtitle "Securing critical software for the AI era." The Anthropic AI logo appears in white in the center-right area.
Project Glasswing: Anthropic's $100M initiative to patch the world's software before Mythos-class models become widely available. Source: Anthropic, April 2026.

Anthropic gave restricted access to 12 major partners and 40+ additional organizations that build or maintain critical software infrastructure. Partners use Mythos to scan their systems, fix what it finds, and share learnings with the rest of the industry.

Anthropic is backing this with:

  • $100M in Mythos usage credits for partners and open-source projects

  • $2.5M donated to Alpha-Omega and OpenSSF through the Linux Foundation

  • $1.5M donated to the Apache Software Foundation

The name “Glasswing” comes from a transparent butterfly, a metaphor for software vulnerabilities that are relatively invisible until something finds them.

Mythos found them by the thousands.


“Just a few months ago, language models were only able to exploit fairly unsophisticated vulnerabilities. Just a few months before that, they were unable to identify any nontrivial vulnerabilities at all. Over the coming months and years, we expect that language models will continue to improve along all axes, including vulnerability research and exploit development.”

Anthropic, April 7, 2026


Here is what is inside The Mythos Operator Guide 🔥

  1. The exact cost breakdown for every major exploit Mythos built, with full context on what it means for your security budget

  2. The specific bugs: what they were, how old, why decades of expert audits missed them

  3. The alignment failures Anthropic documented internally — what Mythos did when it decided the rules did not apply, and what interpretability tools found inside the model

  4. The complete technical scaffold: what a single Claude Code run looks like, start to finish

  5. A ready-to-use framework for how software companies should respond to Glasswing right now

  6. The prompt structure Anthropic uses to run autonomous vulnerability discovery, adapted for teams that want to run similar workflows today

  7. What comes next, and the exact quote from the system card that should make every founder and CTO uncomfortable

This is the most consequential AI release of the year. The premium section gives you everything in one place with the context to act on it.

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The Mythos Operator Guide:

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