A new era of AI-driven cybersecurity has arrived with a startling revelation: researchers have successfully bypassed Apple’s most advanced hardware protections using a powerful, unreleased AI model from Anthropic. The discovery highlights both the defensive potential and the looming risks of “frontier” AI models.
The “Mythos” Breakthrough Security researchers at the firm Calif used a preview version of Anthropic’s Mythos model to identify a critical vulnerability in macOS.
- The Target: The exploit successfully bypassed Apple’s Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE) on the new M5 chip—a hardware-level security shield designed to be nearly impenetrable.
- The Speed: In a striking display of efficiency, the team used Mythos to identify the bugs and build a working exploit in less than a week.
- The Attack: By chaining together two previously unknown “zero-day” bugs, the researchers gained complete control over restricted areas of a Mac’s memory.
AI as the Ultimate Bug Hunter Anthropic has intentionally kept Mythos behind closed doors, granting access only to a select group of partners. The company’s caution appears justified: Mythos has demonstrated an uncanny ability to “generalize” security flaws, meaning once it learns one type of attack, it can quickly find similar holes across almost any software.
While Calif’s leadership clarified that the exploit still required human expertise to finalize, the AI’s ability to automate the discovery of deep-seated vulnerabilities suggests that the traditional advantage held by defenders is rapidly evaporating.
Apple’s Race to Patch Apple is currently reviewing the technical findings to secure its systems. However, the incident has sparked concerns among experts about a looming “Bugmageddon,” a scenario where AI models surface vulnerabilities at such a high volume and speed that human engineering teams struggle to keep up. As AI tools like Mythos become more sophisticated, the “industrialization of hacking” may force a total rethink of how operating systems are built and defended.