A Smaller Mythos for Everyone Else

Reports now put a public version of Claude Mythos a day away, with several outlets pointing to a June 10 release. I'd treat the date as soft. Anthropic has said since the May 28 Opus 4.8 announcement that it expects to bring Mythos-class models to all customers "in the coming weeks," and "coming weeks" is the kind of phrase that quietly absorbs a missed Tuesday.

What's not soft is the gap between the model going public and the model that spent the spring inside Project Glasswing. Mythos earned its restriction. In Anthropic's own testing it produced working exploits 72.4 percent of the time, against roughly zero for Opus 4.6. Pointed at open source, it scanned more than a thousand projects and surfaced over 23,000 flaws, 6,000-plus rated high or critical, including a certificate-forgery bug in wolfSSL that reaches billions of devices. That one's patched. Plenty won't be by tomorrow.

So the public release isn't that model. The version heading to general customers carries heavier guardrails and deliberately narrowed cybersecurity functions. The full capability stays behind the Glasswing fence, where access just widened to roughly 200 organisations across more than fifteen countries.

Which puts a familiar question back on the table, the one I had when Mythos moved into infrastructure: who decides where the fence sits? Somebody is sorting the world into the two hundred organisations that get the live model and everyone who gets the muzzled one, and Anthropic frames that sorting as a safety phase. A two-tier capability looks less like a phase the longer it holds, and nobody has named the condition that ends it.

Opus 4.8 was the bridge, the public model that inherited part of the capability without the teeth, and tomorrow's release looks like the same trade made explicit. Anthropic's defence is that none of this lasts: it expects Mythos-level capability to be widely available across the field within six to twelve months, attackers included. That forecast is convenient as well as plausible, since inevitable diffusion is the argument that justifies shipping now rather than holding back. If it's right, the guardrails matter less than they look. The fence holds until someone else sells the gap.

Sources:

Anthropic's Claude Mythos Public Release Imminent, Possible June 10 Launch — Digital Today

Anthropic's Claude Mythos, or a Model Like It, to Get Public Release — Mashable

Anthropic Expands Mythos to 150 Additional Organizations in More Than 15 Countries — CNBC