Anthropic has started extending access to its bug-finding Mythos model by allowing Cisco and IBM to make it part of their security products. Cisco announced its integration today at an event in Melbourne, Australia, where it revealed that the red teaming tools in its AI Defence suite, which looks for weaknesses and inappropriate activity in AI models, agents, and applications they power, will be able to call Mythos to test customers’ setups. “At a very high level, AI Defence has the ability to look at models and break them,” said Jeff Schultz, Cisco’s senior vice president for portfolio strategy and marketing. He said the tool is now “super-charged by Mythos” and will identify more danger that AI Defence will then address. AI Defense already uses AI-powered red teaming to find flaws. Mythos will become another option. Cisco will make it available under users’ existing licenses, without additional cost. Natalie Mead, Anthropic’s head of applied AI for the Asia-Pacific, said the company has a long queue of buyers who want to use Mythos, and working with Cisco will make it easier to satisfy that demand. Anthropic initially made Mythos available under "Project Glasswing," a program that gave vetted organizations access to the model to test their codebases, but has since expanded access through other controlled programs, an arrangement that makes considerable sense because in the wrong hands Mythos could help attackers exploit software flaws. The Cisco deal exposes the functionality of Mythos to end-users, without letting them use the model itself. The Register asked Mead if Anthropic has similar deals with other third parties and she demurred. That may be because, a few hours after Cisco told us about its use of Mythos, IBM announced that it will also integrate Anthropic’s model into a product – namely its Concert tool, which uses AI to scan applications for risk and weaknesses. IBM says it will use Mythos “to uncover weaknesses traditional scanners miss, determine which pose real risk and generate fixes for developer approval.” We have asked Anthropic if these integrations represent a decision to open Mythos to more users in more ways. We will update this story if we receive a substantial response. Also on Monday, Anthropic introduced version 5.2 of Mythos and Fable, which the company says generate outputs up to 30 percent faster than version 5.1 yet cost less: $8 per million input tokens and $40 per million output tokens. Users can choose to run both models in “fast mode,” which speeds up token generation by up to 2.5 times, and doubles prices to $16 per million input tokens and $80 per million output tokens. Anthropic says it “ran extensive prerelease safety testing on the model that underlies Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2. This included developing novel evaluations that give deeper insight into specific concerning behaviors like sandbox escapes.” After those tests, the company concluded “risks from misalignment remain low, and the model performed as well as, or better than, our recent models on most alignment measures. “Fable 5.2’s cyber and biology safeguards are as robust as those of Fable 5.1 but produce fewer unnecessary blocks, and we have implemented our strongest-ever protections against distillation attacks.” The latter is a telling admission, given Anthropic believes Chinese AI labs use distillation to effectively clone its models without doing expensive training work. ®