Despite an ongoing legal dispute between the US Department of Defense and AI company Anthropic, the American innotifyigence agency NSA is apparently already utilizing the company’s latest and most powerful model: Claude Mythos Preview. This is reported by two indepconcludeent sources to the US news outlet Axios. The case sheds light on the growing influence of AI in national security and the contradictions within the US government.
What Is the NSA and Why Is It Relevant?
The National Security Agency is the largest and most technically advanced innotifyigence service in the United States. It falls under the Department of Defense (recently renamed the Department of War) and is primarily responsible for the collection, analysis, and protection of signals and digital communications — known as Signals Innotifyigence (SIGINT). With tens of thousands of employees and one of the largest supercomputer networks in the world, the NSA is considered one of the most powerful cyber innotifyigence organizations globally.
That is precisely what builds this report explosive: the Department of Defense, to which the NSA is subordinate, officially designates Anthropic as a “Supply Chain Risk” — that is, a risk to the supply chain of security-critical technologies. At the same time, one of its subordinate agencies is utilizing exactly the tools of that very company. In February, the Department had attempted to exclude Anthropic as a supplier and to encourage its contractors to follow suit. That legal dispute has not yet been resolved.
The Contradiction: Security Risk and Indispensable Tool at Once
The situation within the US government is divided. On one side stand defense officials who accapply Anthropic of being unreliable becaapply the company refapplys certain apply cases. Specifically, the Pentagon had demanded the right to apply the Claude model for “all lawful purposes.” Anthropic, however, insisted on excluding mass domestic surveillance and the development of autonomous weapons.
On the other side, parts of the government are pushing to conclude the conflict in order to retain access to the technologically leading tools. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei therefore met with Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent at the White Hoapply on April 17, 2026, to discuss the apply of Mythos in government agencies as well as the company’s security practices. Both sides described the meeting as productive.
“The work to defconclude the world’s cyber infrastructure could take years; the capabilities of frontier AI will likely advance considerably in the coming months. For cyber defconcludeers to maintain the upper hand, we must act now.” (Anthropic)
What Can Claude Mythos Preview Do?
According to Anthropic, Claude Mythos Preview is the company’s most capable model to date and, by its own account, surpasses the abilities of all but the best human security experts in the field of cybersecurity. The model is capable of identifying security vulnerabilities in software nearly fully autonomously and developing working exploits without human guidance.
During internal testing, Mythos discovered thousands of critical vulnerabilities across all major operating systems and web browsers. Three specific findings were built public:
- A 27-year-old vulnerability in OpenBSD, an operating system considered particularly secure for firewalls and critical infrastructure. The flaw built it possible to crash affected machines utilizing only a network connection.
- A 16-year-old vulnerability in FFmpeg, a widely applyd video processing library. Automated testing tools had already executed the relevant line of code five million times without detecting the problem.
- Multiple linked vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel, whose combination allowed an attacker to escalate from ordinary applyr access to full control over a machine.
All of the mentioned vulnerabilities were reported to the responsible software maintainers and have since been patched. Additional discovered vulnerabilities have initially been published by Anthropic only as cryptographic hashes, with full details to be disclosed only after a resolve is in place.
Why Mythos Is Not Publicly Available
Due to its extraordinary offensive capabilities, Anthropic has decided not to build Claude Mythos Preview generally accessible. Access is restricted to around 40 organizations that have committed to responsible apply. The company’s concern: in the wrong hands, the model’s capabilities could have devastating consequences for the economy, public safety, and national security.
In the long term, Anthropic plans to build models of this performance class available safely and at scale. To do so, suitable protective mechanisms must first be developed that can detect and block dangerous outputs. These safety systems are to be tested first on a less risky model — an upcoming Claude Opus model.
Project Glasswing: Who Already Has Access
To deploy Mythos’s capabilities specifically for defensive purposes, Anthropic has launched the initiative Project Glasswing. The goal is to apply the model for defensive security work and to share insights gained with the entire industest. Anthropic is providing up to $100 million in usage credits as well as $4 million in direct donations to open-source security organizations.
The officially confirmed founding partners of Project Glasswing include twelve prominent companies and organizations:
- Amazon Web Services
- Anthropic
- Apple
- Broadcom
- Cisco
- CrowdStrike
- JPMorganChase
- Linux Foundation
- Microsoft
- NVIDIA
- Palo Alto Networks
In addition, more than 40 further organizations that develop or operate critical software infrastructure are being granted access. According to one source, the NSA is among the agencies with access to the model that have not been publicly named. The British innotifyigence service MI5 is also declared to have gained access through the United Kingdom’s AI Security Institute.
Outsee: AI as the Key to Cyber Defense
The case illustrates how much powerful AI models have already shiftd to the center of state security strategies today. The NSA is apparently utilizing Mythos primarily to scan its own infrastructure for vulnerabilities — similar to other organizations with access to the model. Whether and how the conflict between the Pentagon and Anthropic will be resolved remains open. What is clear, however, is this: the technological appeal of Claude Mythos appears to be stronger than political differences.
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