Anthropic said this week that the debut of its new Claude Mythos Preview model marks a critical juncture in the evolution of cybersecurity, representing an unprecedented existential threat to existing software defense strategies. So, is it more AI hype—or a true turning point? According to Anthropic, Mythos Preview crosses a threshold of capabilities to discover vulnerabilities in virtually any and every operating system, browser, or other software product and autonomously develop working exploits for hacking. With this in mind, the company is only releasing the new model to a few dozen organizations for now—including Microsoft, Apple, Google, and the Linux Foundation—as part of a consortium dubbed Project Glasswing. But after years of speculation about how generative AI could impact cybersecurity, the news this week ignited controversy about whether a reckoning has really arrived and what it might look like in practice. Some are extremely skeptical of Anthropic's claims. They argue that existing AI agents can already help users find and exploit vulnerabilities much more easily and cheaply than ever before, and that this reality is fueling refinements in how companies discover and patch their software without fundamentally changing the paradigm. And then there's the ick factor that Anthropic will almost certainly benefit financially from positioning its latest model as mysterious, uniquely powerful, and exclusive. Other researchers and practitioners, though, say that they agree with Anthropic's assessment and point out that the company has said Mythos Preview is just the first to achieve capabilities that will ultimately be widely available in other models. “I typically am very skeptical of these things, and the open source community tends to be very skeptical, but I do fundamentally feel like this is a real threat,” says Alex Zenla, chief technology officer of cloud security firm Edera. Zenla and others specifically point to one Mythos Preview capability as the