By Raphael Satter<\/p>\n
WASHINGTON, July 6 (Reuters) – The U.S. cyber defense agency CISA is using Anthropic’s AI model Mythos to audit government software, three people familiar with the matter said on \u200cMonday, another sign of government enthusiasm for adopting the AI startup’s tools even as the company \u200cnavigates an ongoing standoff with the White House.<\/p>\n
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is using Mythos to scan government code repositories for \u200bbugs that could leave the door open for foreign spies and cybercriminals, the sources said.<\/p>\n
Anthropic did not respond to questions about the initiative. A CISA representative said last month that he would check to see if there was anything to share about the matter but did not respond to further emails.<\/p>\n
The scanning is being done by \u200cCISA’s Attack Surface Evaluation team, according \u2060to one of the sources. The team is a group within CISA that conducts digital security assessments and hacking exercises across government.<\/p>\n
Two of the sources said the audits \u2060had already uncovered a large number of vulnerabilities but did not elaborate. Reuters could not establish exactly how much government code the team had gone through or the nature or severity of the bugs it discovered.<\/p>\n
ANTHROPIC’S ROCKY U.S. GOVERNMENT \u200bTIES<\/p>\n
Anthropic, \u200bwhich has confidentially filed for a U.S. initial public offering, \u200bhas had a tumultuous relationship with the \u200cU.S. government. Relations reached a nadir in February after the San Francisco-based company refused to remove safeguards that prevented its AI from being used for autonomous weapons or domestic surveillance. That prompted the Pentagon to slap it with a formal supply-chain risk designation, a label heretofore applied to foreign companies suspected of facilitating espionage.<\/p>\n
The extraordinary blacklisting was blocked by a judge in March, and the conflict has eased following the private release \u200cof Anthropic’s Mythos, an AI model described as extremely capable \u200bat finding and exploiting cybersecurity vulnerabilities.<\/p>\n
The National Security Agency, the U.S. \u200bgovernment’s powerful eavesdropping agency, has been using \u200bMythos as far back as April despite the blacklist, Axios has reported. Late last \u200cmonth, the New York Times said that NSA \u200banalysts had been testing Mythos \u200bin classified settings and coming away impressed with its capabilities. But when Anthropic rolled out a public version of Mythos called Fable, which included what it described as cybersecurity safeguards, the White House \u200bsuddenly demanded that it ban foreigners \u200cfrom running it. This triggered a global shutdown of the model that was lifted only \u200blast week.<\/p>\n
The NSA and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n
(Reporting \u200bby Raphael Satter in Washington; Editing by Matthew Lewis)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Raphael Satter WASHINGTON, July 6 (Reuters) – The U.S. cyber defense agency CISA is using Anthropic’s AI…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":96855,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[53,6455,22986,597,50590,47815,353,4862],"class_list":["post-96854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anthropic","tag-anthropic","tag-cisa","tag-cybersecurity-and-infrastructure-security-agency","tag-government","tag-government-code","tag-government-software","tag-mythos","tag-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96854"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96854\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/96855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}