Transcript
Jessica Mendoza (0:05)
Last month, a group of computer researchers ran a test. They wanted to try using artificial intelligence to hack an operating system called OpenBSD.
Bob McMillan (0:16)
So OpenBSD is an operating system, you know, like Windows or Mac os. It's been around for a long time.
Jessica Mendoza (0:24)
Our colleague Bob McMillan covers cybersecurity. He says this operating system is considered very secure. It survived decades of cyber attacks.
Bob McMillan (0:33)
It's kind of on the front of the Internet for many corporations. It's used in firewalls, so it's facing the hackers all the time. So it's a good project to look at because it's been battle tested. Right. And it's had lots of time for people to look for bugs and report them and fix them and stuff like that.
Jessica Mendoza (0:54)
A software bug is a flaw in a computer program that causes problems or even a crash. Hackers try to find bugs because they can use them as sort of a door into an otherwise closed computer system. So in this experiment, researchers took the latest AI model from Anthropic called Mythos, then let it loose into the software,
Bob McMillan (1:18)
and they said, find us some bugs. And it found this bug. A guy named Nils Provost had written some code in 1998, and he made a mistake, and nobody noticed that mistake for over 27 years until mythos took a shot at it.
Jessica Mendoza (1:35)
Wow. The bug Mythos found could have caused a serious problem, and it had sat there undetected by humans for nearly 30 years. So, I mean, what does this tell you about Mythos? Is it better at this than humans?
Bob McMillan (1:54)
I mean, it's. You could sort of craft this narrative, like, oh, my gosh, they've had 27 years, and, like, no one saw it, and then AI found it. Like, there are bugs that humans have missed that AI Is able to find. I mean, that's a legit phenomenon.
Jessica Mendoza (2:08)
Anthropic, the company that made Mythos, said that the model was so powerful and it could, quote, reshape cybersecurity. And Mythos is just the beginning. Already, the cybersecurity world is struggling to keep up.
Bob McMillan (2:21)
AI Models are getting very good at finding security vulnerabilities. The amount of bugs that are being found right now is skyrocketing, and people are freaking out because of that. Mythos has become the poster child for a phenomenon that I've been writing about for months, that people in the cybersecurity industry have been talking about for months. But with the Mythos release, it achieved critical mass.
