April 7 (Reuters) - Anthropic on Tuesday announced an initiative with major technology companies, including Amazon.com, Microsoft and Apple, that lets partners preview an advanced model with cybersecurity capabilities developed by the AI startup.
Under its "Project Glasswing", select organizations will be allowed to use the startup's unreleased and general-purpose AI model, "Claude Mythos Preview", for defensive cybersecurity work, Anthropic said. Other partners include CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, Google and Nvidia.
The announcement follows a Fortune report last month that Anthropic was testing Claude Mythos, which it said posed security risks and also offered advanced capabilities, dragging shares of cybersecurity firms such as Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike sharply lower.
This year's RSA cybersecurity conference in San Francisco was also dominated by talk about the rise of AI-powered cyberattacks and whether conventional security tools sufficed.
In a blog post on Tuesday, Anthropic said Mythos Preview had found "thousands" of major vulnerabilities in operating systems, web browsers and other software.
The startup said launch partners will use Mythos Preview in their defensive security work, and Anthropic will share findings with industry.
Anthropic said it is also extending access to about 40 additional organizations responsible for critical software infrastructure, and made a commitment of up to $100 million in usage credits and $4 million in donations to open-source security groups.
The AI startup added that its eventual goal is for "our users to safely deploy Mythos-class models at scale."
The startup said it has also been in ongoing discussions with the U.S. government about the model's capabilities.
Last year, Anthropic said that hackers exploited vulnerabilities in its Claude AI to attack around 30 global organizations. Moreover, 67% of the 1,000 executives surveyed in an IBM and Palo Alto Networks study said they had been targeted by AI attacks within the past year.
(Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru and Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco; Editing by Leroy Leo)
