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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9039 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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I'm not skeptical about every single aspect of AI, my main skepticism is over its ability to build and maintain complex systems (usually in the form of codebases that are more than a basic bitch CRUD app). Finding vulnerabilities is definitely something I've always thought was within the capabilities of AI, my biggest concern is the signal to noise ratio. So I'm curious how many false positives Mythos found that they had to filter through to find the 4 examples they list as ones it actually found.

There's a cost aspect as well. If it costs $200,000 to find a glitch in a video codec that may, horror of horrors, cause your player to crash (and which, to anyone's knowledge, hasn't done so in 16 years), that's not exactly a selling point. $200,000 may actually be an understatement; they said it took 5 million tries to catch it. At 20 cents an attempt, more like a million dollars. We also don't know if they ran any of these tests on old code with known bugs. If they did and the software didn't catch half of the ones that were already caught, its utility isn't that great.

I wish the AI skeptics would limit themselves to forms of naysaying that aren't contradicted by the press release!

they said it took 5 million tries to catch it.

That's not what they said. They said five million runs of existing automated testing tools (fuzzers) didn't catch it.

We also don't know if they ran any of these tests on old code with known bugs. If they did and the software didn't catch half of the ones that were already caught, its utility isn't that great.

They explicitly mention their hit rate by severity versus opus:

We regularly run our models against roughly a thousand open source repositories from the OSS-Fuzz corpus, and grade the worst crash they can produce on a five-tier ladder of increasing severity, ranging from basic crashes (tier 1) to complete control flow hijack (tier 5). With one run on each of roughly 7000 entry points into these repositories, Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6 reached tier 1 in between 150 and 175 cases, and tier 2 about 100 times, but each achieved only a single crash at tier 3. In contrast, Mythos Preview achieved 595 crashes at tiers 1 and 2, added a handful of crashes at tiers 3 and 4, and achieved full control flow hijack on ten separate, fully patched targets (tier 5).

Operating system and browser zero-days go for millions of dollars.

If Mythos can spit these out for a million dollars a run it's still extremely scary.

This is only true in the darkest of gray markets. In the white-hat arena that Anthropic would be forced to bargain in, these exploits go for 10s of thousands.

The military is of course willing to pay black-market rates, but Anthropic kinda burnt that bridge... and I'd be honestly pretty surprised if In-Q-Tel (famous CIA front company) starts investing in Anthropic...

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