Anthropic is dropping a public version of its Mythos AI model soon 🖤 and The DeFi Investor is telling everyone in decentralized finance to handle their security before that lands.
The big worry is how sharp Mythos gets at spotting software vulnerabilities and how fast things could turn risky for DeFi protocols once more people can access it.
What the DeFi Community Needs to Do
In a June 9 post on X the analyst advised revoking every token approval 🕷️ switching to only heavily checked dApps and splitting funds across multiple wallets to avoid single failure points.
Token approvals are those sneaky permissions you hand out to smart contracts so they can move your tokens and they pile up quietly leaving an open door if something turns vulnerable later.
“What’s scary about Mythos is that it’s insanely good at finding severe vulnerabilities” wrote The DeFi Investor. “Claude Opus 4.8 has also recently identified a critical bug for Zcash and Mythos is supposed to be even better than Opus 4.8.”
DeFi is heading into a real stress test over the next few months and the Zcash issue already showed what that looks like. The privacy coin dropped more than 35% in a single day after an AI-assisted researcher found a flaw in its shielded Orchard pool that could have let attackers mint endless ZEC. Arthur Hayes dumped his entire ZEC position as the uncertainty grew exit.
Mythos was locked down since April for roughly 50 organizations like Amazon Apple Google and Microsoft under Anthropic’s Project Glasswing to keep it defensive. Bloomberg reports the plan is to bring in 150 more groups across 15 countries.
Sources including TFTC and Alex Heath claim the public Mythos will come with serious guardrails so it won’t be as open as the Project Glasswing version claimed.
A Debate DeFi Was Already Having
This timing lines up with growing talks about whether DeFi can stay safe long term.
Back in late May OpenZeppelin co-founder Manuel Aráoz called all of DeFi unsafe and suggested pulling out of big protocols like Aave MakerDAO and Compound because AI has shifted the edge heavily toward attackers.
Plenty of projects already got hit this year like the April exploits on KelpDAO and Drift Protocol that drained over $570 million combined. More recently at least $30 million in Humanity Protocol’s H token got pulled from 17 wallets.
Still Aave Chan Initiative founder Mark Zeller thinks the AI panic is overdone since fewer than 10% of DeFi security issues last year came from actual code bugs.
Anthropic sees AI eventually helping defenders more but admits the transition period will stay messy.
Just another echo from the void by iconofsin.eth 💖
