The article describes how they immediately went to look for an unsigned 32-bit millisecond counter when they noticed it was happening around 50 days since last reboot, because they already knew that association you describe.
Interesting writeup. Fun little story about the detective work involved.
According to your POV here, companies can claim whatever and it’s my job now to figure out if they are lying or to what extent.
No, the actual claims here, that describe specific bugs in specific software, can be evaluated. Even without whipping out a test environment to try to reproduce the results with your own proof of concept, you can read the text and evaluate whether the claims make sense on their face.
a broken clock is never right, reality momentarily aligns with it, which is a completely different thing
And that’s why the substance of a statement matters. I don’t believe in the supernatural, so if someone says “I’m a psychic and the missing girl on the news is in a shed near the water,” that doesn’t register with me at all. But if that person says “I’m a psychic and the missing girl is in a shed at 1234 Main Street” that raises eyebrows because it is easily falsifiable. And if the person says “I’m a psychic and the missing girl is in a shed, so I looked and found her and reported it to the cops, and here’s a cryptographic hash of my description of how I found her, which I’ll publish once the cops confirm she’s safe” that’s gonna be a much more serious statement. Even if I don’t believe that the person actually is a psychic, I can pay attention to how the whole thing played out because the person claims serious non-psychic validation of the results, and the results themselves are important entirely externally from the claim of whether psychics have powers.
This is a story about several cybersecurity vulnerabilities, some of which sound medium or high severity in very commonly used software. That’s important in itself, outside of AI mattering at all. And if they claim to have the receipts in a falsifiable way, that’s the kind of thing that shows a high degree of confidence in the genuineness of what was found.
I don’t give a shit about AI and I’m generally a skeptic of the future of any of these AI companies. But if someone uses AI tools to discover something new in the subjects that I do care about, like cybersecurity, then I’ll pay attention to the results and what they publish in that field.
This is really a corporate problem of their own making and their responsibility to fix. They have lied so much, I do not owe then a single iota of trust.
The statements can stand for themselves, evaluated on the merits of the claims, regardless of authorship. That’s how these things should work. Someone who has a great history of finding vulnerabilities still has to stand by each exploit/proof of concept they write, on its own merits. On the flip side, the corollary to the adage that a broken clock is still right twice a day is that you can’t just say “oh the broken clock said this so I can ignore it.”
Do you really think any of them would post something like “yeah, we found a vulnerability but it’s basically a typo that could not be seriously exploited”?
The blog post literally describes exactly that, for ffmpeg. And several of the other described vulnerabilities sound like they’re in that category of “here’s a bug but we didn’t find an exploit.”
Simply refusing to engage with these big claims just because of the source is an irresponsible way to approach cybersecurity.
even if the whole scenario is real, it may not have the intervention of Ai they are claiming
…who cares? If it’s a real bug and a real PR addressing the bug, why does authorship or methodology matter?
It’s just the ad hominem fallacy (or the close relative, appeal to authority). Let the actual substance stand and fall on its merits. Read the described vulnerabilities and exploits and decide whether you think those need to be patched and how critical/severe the bugs/vulnerabilities are.
And maybe your priorities are different from mine, but the core of the claim (we found some vulnerabilities) trigger a responsibility to address them (confirm and patch). I don’t care about marketing or corporate interests or whatever in those circumstances, I’m just focused on fixing problems that have been found.
Yes I understand, but I’m also putting the direct claims right there, not filtered through Anthropic’s PR or an article from the IT industry press interpreting those PR statements.
These are real CVEs that have actually been submitted to the code maintainers for both FOSS and closed source software that is foundational to the computing world. Some of them are published in this post. And many more are simply described with a hash of the full writeup indicating that they have it written out and are waiting for the patches to be applied. I’m especially interested in the Virtual Machine Monitor and the exploits for jumping out of browser sandboxes for “all major browsers.”
Some of the published CVEs in the blog post seem pretty serious, especially the FreeBSD remote root access for devices running NFS. The OpenBSD one is a critical DOS vector, and the FFMPEG one is just a bug that doesn’t seem to actually expose the software to any practical exploits but should still be patched.
But they’ve staked it out with their public disclosure of the hashes and a description of a few of the problems. These are big bold claims that are provided in a format that will be easily falsifiable in due time. And treating it as just marketing fluff ignores the shades of gray that actually apply to corporate claims.
The security blog writeup is here:
https://red.anthropic.com/2026/mythos-preview/
They’ve described several patched CVEs and disclosed the hashes of writeups that are currently undergoing the responsible disclosure process.
It lists quite a few, so I’ll be checking back when the vulnerabilities/exploits are patched and disclosed.
God I wish democracy meant that we could vote on decisions like this
You can! Only problem is that it’s one vote per dollar instead of one vote per person.
It sucks though, I agree - software should get more efficient over time, just like hardware does.
It generally does, for any given computing task, but the problem is that generally software adds more features over time, not least of which is supporting new hardware that hits the ecosystem.
What if license and copyright was washed by using an LLM to translate Claude into another language?
The law doesn’t allow you to launder copyright like that. That’s just a derivative work, which can be restricted by the copyright holder in the original. As an example, in fictional writing, distinct characters are copyrighted, and using an LLM to generate new works using those copyrighted characters would still be a derivative work that the original copyright owner would have the right to deny distribution.
So if you have a copyrighted codebase and you try to implement that codebase using some kind of transformation of that code, that’d still be a derivative work and infringe the original copyright.
Now if you have some kind of clean room implementation where you can show that it was written without copying the original code itself, only working to implement its functionality through documentation/reverse engineering how the code worked, you’d be able to escape out of calling it a derivative work and could distribute it without the original copyright holder’s permission (Compaq did this with the IBM BIOS to make unauthorized/unlicensed PC clones, and Google did this with the Java API to make Android without a license from Sun/Oracle and won at the Supreme Court).
Claude can’t be copyrighted because it’s a product of an LLM.
No, because Claude’s code is still created by humans with the assistance of non-human tools. There’s a spectrum from spelling correction and tab completion in IDEs all the way to full vibe coding with a prompt describing the raw functionality (where the prompt is so uncreative that it isn’t itself copyrightable). Anthropic has never claimed that there was no human in the loop, or that the prompts it uses are so uncreative and purely functional so that the outputs aren’t copyrightable.
Arch’s package management is actually the ideal, in my opinion. Official repositories for the stuff the distro maintainers want to officially support, a user-maintained AUR for other common packages, and the ability to build your own software with the Arch Build System, and letting pacman know where everything is. In a sense, the stuff in the official repositories have a privileged position, and you should be aware of the difference between the AUR and the official repositories, but you’re still always in control of what software is installed.
The AUR packages and user-specific builds can be thought of as side loading, and the distinction can matter in some circumstances. So I’m ok with having another name for different installation/upgrade/update methods.
Unless it can be paper thin this does not look better than magnetic tape.
As the article explains, the whole purpose here is to be able to store data on a medium that can endure harsh conditions, including heat, moisture, radiation, and physical abrasion. The company’s website claims the medium can retain data for 5000 years without power, and is water and fire resistant.
I reckon you could scratch it pretty easily.
The underlying ceramic film is already used for protecting tools like drill bits and saw blades from physical damage, which is why it was chosen for this project. They already found one of the most durable materials in the world, and asked whether they could store data using that already-durable material.
The website could know whether the username actually exists on the system. But revealing that information is a security weakness because someone could at least learn who has an account at that site (especially if usernames are email addresses, as they often are).