Let's talk again: What exactly is Mythos and why is the encryption industry so fiercely competing for testing permissions? Will ETH be bearish in the future Find a special topic every week to interpret the aspects that many people ask about; This week is Anthropic's latest and cutting-edge AI model Mythos (full name Claude Mythos Preview); Its core capabilities are particularly explosive, especially in the fields of network security and code auditing: the ability to autonomously discover and exploit zero day vulnerabilities. Let's talk about it below one ️⃣ What exactly is Mythos? You can imagine it as a super hacker AI, capable of conducting software security testing to a depth and scale that was previously impossible for humans and traditional tools to achieve. But precisely because it is too strong and too dangerous, Anthropic dare not publicly release it. They launched a controlled early testing program called Project Glasswing, which only provides limited testing permissions to a very small number of rigorously screened tech giants, financial companies, important open source projects, etc., specifically for defensive security scanning and vulnerability patching. two ️⃣ Why is the encryption industry so fiercely competing? The reason is very practical and life or death: the attack surface of encryption infrastructure is extremely large and valuable. Exchanges, wallets, custodial services, DeFi protocols, smart contracts, and open-source crypto libraries are almost all code driven, and many of them are open-source. Once it is breached, the money will directly go on the chain and run away irreversibly. After the emergence of AI at the level of Mythos, attackers are highly likely to obtain similar abilities in the future. At that time, discovering vulnerabilities → writing exploits → launching attacks may have been shortened from days/weeks to minutes to hours. So the encryption industry must take the lead and use the strongest AI to scan and repair its own system first, and then reinforce it to the strongest state, otherwise it will be passively beaten, and may suffer losses of hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, or even the entire project will be killed. three ️⃣ Let's talk about the impact on the ETH network: Mythos is not a direct weapon against Ethereum, but it poses a significant security threat to the entire crypto/DeFi ecosystem, and Ethereum is the absolute mainstay of DeFi. As I mentioned before, Mythos will only kill low-quality Defi and instead benefit Ethereum. I know what everyone is worried about. In this narrative, the era of AI hackers has arrived early. If Mythos related vulnerabilities are leaked or malicious parties gain similar capabilities, high-value protocols on Ethereum (Lido, Uniswap, Aave, etc.) may become the primary targets. This is somewhat similar to the previous narrative of quantum computing threatening BTC, this time it's' AI threatening DeFi ', But in reality, the Ethereum ecosystem has natural advantages: multi client (Geth, Nethermind, etc.), upgradable mechanism (L2, hard fork), and EF recently subsidizing security audits (up to 30% fee). Using AI tools like Mythos can achieve unprecedented depth in auditing, which is like injecting a super vaccine into the entire on chain infrastructure. In a broader sense, I believe that if TradFi (banks, custodians) are attacked by AI, funds may accelerate their flow onto the on chain, and Ethereum as the DeFi foundation will directly benefit. Some crypto Twitter even see this as a 'new bull case' - the less secure traditional finance is, the more valuable ETH is. So my opinion is that the long-term narrative of AI+Ethereum (Vitalik has also repeatedly talked about AI agents needing Ethereum as a settlement layer) will be strengthened rather than weakened by this event.