Anthropic’s Mythos AI model has famously been kept fairly secret due to its apparent risk to software systems around the world. And today a new report says Mythos was used to expose macOS security vulnerabilities that Apple is investigating now.

Robert McMillan, writing at The Wall Street Journal:

Security researchers say they have discovered a new way of circumventing Apple’s state-of-the art security technology, using techniques they discovered while testing an early version of Anthropic’s Mythos AI software in April.

The researchers with Calif, a Palo Alto-based security research company, say the software they wrote links together two bugs and a handful of techniques to corrupt the Mac’s memory and then gain access to parts of the device that should be inaccessible.

It is what’s known as a privilege escalation exploit, and if it were chained together with other attacks it could be used by a hacker to seize control of the computer.

McMillan says that Apple is currently reviewing the report from Calif to validate its findings. A spokesperson from Apple told the WSJ: ““Security is our top priority, and we take reports of potential vulnerabilities very seriously.”

The team at Calif assembled a 55-page report that it delivered in person to Apple in Cupertino containing its findings.

Calif’s chief executive, Thai Dong, said that the attack “couldn’t have been pulled off by Mythos alone and leveraged the very human cybersecurity expertise of some of Calif’s hackers.”

Details regarding Calif’s discoveries are going to be released by the company once the underlying issues are addressed by Apple. Duong told the WSJ that he thinks the bugs “will likely be fixed pretty quickly.”

You can read more about Anthropic’s Mythos in our coverage here.

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