How Claude's AI model may cause security issues for your money
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Updated / Tuesday, 19 May 2026 07:12
The concern with AI is it may make advanced cyber capabilities more scalable, faster, cheaper, and more accessible than before. (Image: Getty Images)
Stephen Treacy
By Stephen Treacy
UCC
More from<br>UCC
Analysis: The biggest takeaway from the AI debate is about what happens when it becomes deeply embedded within both sides of the cybersecurity equation
For years, one of the biggest barriers to serious cybercrime was skill. Launching sophisticated attacks required technical expertise, patience, experimentation, and often highly specialised knowledge. While ransomware gangs and cybercrime-as-a-service platforms lowered the barrier somewhat, there was still usually a meaningful gap between the average criminal and a highly capable cyber operator.
That assumption is now being questioned. In recent weeks, growing attention has focused on Claude Mythos, an advanced artificial intelligence model developed by Anthropic under an initiative called Project Glasswing.
Unlike ordinary chatbots designed for general conversation, Mythos was built with exceptionally strong coding, reasoning, and cybersecurity capabilities. According to Anthropic, the system demonstrated an ability to identify and exploit software vulnerabilities at a level that raised sufficient concern for the company to restrict public access to it.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Behind the Story, the highs and lows of AI in 2025
This is a distinct change from the traditional paradigm of cybercrime whereby it has always been shaped by economics. Attackers look for ways to reduce effort, increase scale, automate workflows, and maximise impact. AI potentially changes all four at once. The fear surrounding Claude Mythos is not simply that AI can now write phishing emails or generate malicious code snippets. Those capabilities already exist across many mainstream models. What makes Mythos different is the suggestion that AI systems may increasingly move beyond assisting cyber activity and begin accelerating the entire vulnerability discovery process itself.
Anthropic claims that Mythos Preview can help identify weaknesses across critical software infrastructure, operating systems, and browsers. Reports from the Financial Times suggest regulators, governments, and financial institutions are already assessing what this could mean for cybersecurity resilience, particularly in sectors that depend on ageing and highly interconnected digital systems.
Reuters similarly reported that banks across Asia have begun reassessing their AI and cyber governance strategies in response to concerns over advanced AI-enabled threats. At first glance, this may sound abstract or even exaggerated. Cybersecurity headlines often drift toward dystopian language. But beneath the hype is a more important and practical issue: AI could fundamentally compress the time between finding a vulnerability and exploiting it.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Today with David McCullagh, should Europe wean itself off US tech?
Conventionally, discovering serious software weaknesses required highly skilled security researchers painstakingly examining code, testing systems, and experimenting with possible attack paths. Even when vulnerabilities were discovered, turning them into reliable attacks often required additional expertise. This process created friction. It slowed things down. AI has changed that equation.
Imagine giving a system the ability to examine enormous volumes of software code at machine speed, continuously test different attack possibilities, identify weak...