Lily Hay Newman Security Jun 16, 2026 1:50 PM ‘Dangerous’ AI Models Are Coming No Matter What The US government crackdown on Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 hides a glaring truth: AI models with advanced hacking capabilities will soon be the norm. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Photograph: Jason Henry/Bloomberg/Getty Images Save this story Save this story Late last week, Anthropic took its new Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI models offline following a United States government export-control directive barring “any foreign national” from using the services. The company has been in talks with the White House since Friday but has yet to secure an agreement that would allow it to reinstate the offerings. Since Mythos debuted in April , Anthropic has claimed—and warned—that the model has advanced capabilities for not only finding software vulnerabilities to help defenders patch them, but also figuring out ways to exploit them that could be used by bad actors. Anthropic itself noted this double edged sword in its launch of Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5. “A great deal of advanced usage of AI models is dual use: the same queries that are beneficial in the hands of cybersecurity professionals and biology researchers could be dangerous if available to malicious actors,” the company wrote in a blog post last week. With this in mind, the company initially released a version called Mythos Preview to a select consortium as part of a working group known as Project Glasswing. Mythos 5 was also privately released to this group last week, while Claude Fable 5, which is a Mythos-grade model, was released to the general public with specific blocks on its ability to give responses to questions about biology and cybersecurity. Then, at the end of last week, the Trump administration moved to restrict both models because it believes that Fable 5’s guardrails can be disabled to allow full access to the Mythos 5 capabilities, allegedly making it a national security risk. Experts say, though, that this institutional clash is simply delaying or masking a hard truth: Anthropic may be the tip of the spear in this moment, but AI capabilities in general and models from multiple companies and open-weight developers will almost certainly have similar capabilities to Mythos 5 in the near future—if they don't already. “It's myopic in the extreme to think that no other competitors to Anthropic will develop similar capabilities to Mythos or even that they have not already done so,” says Tarah Wheeler, chief security officer of the specialized cybersecurity consulting firm TPO Group. “There are other companies hot on Anthropic's heels who probably have the capabilities, too, and are holding them in reserve as they see how Anthropic is being treated in the current regulatory environment.” Anthropic itself has emphasized this point since the launch of Mythos Preview. “The real message is that this is not about the model or Anthropic,” Logan Graham, the company's frontier red team lead, told WIRED when Mythos Preview launched in April. “We need to prepare now for a world where these capabilities are broadly available in 6, 12, 24 months.” OpenAI, for example, also did a private release of a cybersecurity-focused model in mid-April and announced an expanded cybersecurity strategy. Researchers note that even before this next generation of models, existing AI offerings could be used for advanced vulnerability-hunting and exploit development with a refined harness. A large group of cybersecurity leaders emphasized this to the administration in an open letter on Sunday, arguing that the White House's export-control directive was misguided. “It's not one model; it's the general trend of technology,” says Bruce Schneier, a researcher at Harvard University and the University of Toronto who has been analyzing the situation. “Smaller, cheaper, open-source models, sometimes by themselves and sometimes in concert with each other, can match Mythos/Fable's performance with more sophisticated prompting. And we should expect other models to match Mythos/Fable's creativity and tenaciousness within months—slightly longer for open-source models.” What the White House and governments around the world need to focus on, experts say, is democratically developing much broader and more transparent plans for how they will contend with advances in AI capabilities on cybersecurity and in other sensitive areas as they inevitably occur. “The policy question is not whether a technology has risk,” says Chris Wysopal, cofounder of the cloud security firm Veracode. “The question is whether a specific restriction meaningfully reduces that risk or whether it mainly slows down the people trying to make systems safer.” Comments Back to top You Might Also Like In your inbox: The week’s biggest tech news in perspective The Pentagon did almost nothing to stop enemies from tracking US troops’ phones Big Story: Can normies really vibe code? A hacker group is poisoning open source code at an unprecedented scale Livestream replay: How AI is transforming work Lily Hay Newman is a senior writer at WIRED focused on information security, digital privacy, and hacking. She previously worked as a technology reporter at Slate, and was the staff writer for Future Tense, a publication and partnership between Slate, the New America Foundation, and Arizona State University. Her work ... Read More Senior Writer Topics cybersecurity artificial intelligence hacking security vulnerabilities Anthropic OpenAI Read More Anthropic Offers Mythos Upgrade for Cyber Partners and a ‘Safe’ Version for the Rest of You Anthropic is releasing Claude Mythos 5 to trusted organizations and Claude Fable 5 to the public, a version it says can’t be used for cyberattacks. Maxwell Zeff Anthropic Is Still at Odds With the White House Over Claude Fable 5 Anthropic leaders flew to Washington, DC, to meet with White House officials on Monday. After high-level talks, they’re still split on the risk Claude Fable 5 presents. Hugo Lowell Anthropic Walks Back Policy That Could Have ‘Sabotaged’ AI Researchers Using Claude The company changed course after researchers spoke out against the policy, which would have covertly limited Claude’s ability to develop competing AI models. Maxwell Zeff Anthropic Says It’s Taking Claude Fable 5 Offline to Comply With US Government Order “The government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or ‘jailbreaking’ Fable 5,” the company said in a blog post. Maxwell Zeff OpenAI and Anthropic Sign Letter to Prevent AI-Developed Biological Weapons Leading AI labs, executives, and scientists are sending a letter to lawmakers urging them to improve tracking of synthetic DNA sequences that could be used for bioweapons. Emily Mullin Former OpenAI Staffers Warn That xAI’s Poor Safety Record Could Complicate SpaceX’s IPO The ex-employees, who cofounded a new AI watchdog group, say investors deserve more information about xAI’s safety practices before SpaceX goes public. Maxwell Zeff CISA Tells US Agencies to Fix Security Bugs in as Little as 3 Days Thanks to AI Threats “Defenders cannot afford to take weeks to patch,” one Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency official warned on Wednesday. Lily Hay Newman The AI Era Is Creating a Bug-Hunting Arms Race As attackers ramp up their AI exploit development, the search for software vulnerabilities is changing rapidly. Lily Hay Newman Anthropic Confidentially Files for What Could Be the Largest IPO Ever The AI giant behind Claude submitted paperwork on Monday that would take it public, just a couple of weeks after SpaceX’s splashy IPO announcement. Paresh Dave This Is How Trump Finally Signed the AI Executive Order After shelving the original executive order last month, Donald Trump finally got on board Monday night. Maxwell Zeff Signal Alums Reveal ‘Encrypted Spaces,’ a System for Making Private Collaboration Apps The new open-source project could serve as the basis for a future of apps with features as complex as Slack, Discord, or Google Docs—but with added protection against surveillance. Andy Greenberg Illinois Lawmakers Just Passed America’s Strongest AI Safety Bill The bill requires companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google to have third parties confirm they’re following safety standards. Illinois governor JB Pritzker says he’ll sign it. Maxwell Zeff