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NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute
Unlocked: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/23/us/politics/nsa-lost-access-anthropic-tool.html?unlocked_article_code=1.sVA.Xgol.aUCRzN6jvdv-&smid=nytcore-ios-share https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/23/us/politics/nsa-lost-acce...
- charcircuit 4mo agoEveryone lost access. What even is mainstream news these days.
- ceejayoz 4mo ago> Everyone lost access. Yes. But unlike the rest of us, NSA didn't have to if the administration had thought about it for 30 seconds before sending their letter. It's a stupid own-goal.
- charcircuit 4mo agoAmericans didn't have to lose access either. It was Anthropic who chose to cut access to more people than they needed to.
- ceejayoz 4mo agoOh? How does Anthropic know I'm a citizen currently? I have no doubt they're working on a passport submission flow as fast as they can now.
- flumes_whims_ 4mo agoHow is Anthropic going to make sure every person using an API key is a citizen?
- Madmallard 4mo agoDoesn't make any sense. They could just force them to provide Mythos to the federal government.
- wan23 4mo agoYou misunderstand - the government issued a directive to Anthropic that effectively forced them to pull access from everyone, even their own employees.
- hk__2 4mo agoThe directive was to remove access to non-Americans, not to pull access from everyone. It’s because Anthropic cannot verify the identity of its users that it pulled access from everyone, not because the government explicitely requested that.
- greatpatton 4mo agoIf their operation team is not US based that's going to be difficult to operate. They would have to reorganize the whole company as I'm pretty sure that they are not employing only US citizen.
- msm_ 4mo ago>I'm pretty sure that they are not employing only US citizen Understatement. They have 14 offices, only 4 of them are in the US (6 are in EMEA, 4 in APAC).
- JumpCrisscross 4mo ago> directive was to remove access to non-Americans Did Hegseth pull his supply-chain risk BS?
- sailfast 4mo agoNo - this was a separate power unrelated to the supply chain risk which is still in effect.
- scottyah 4mo agoWell, kinda in effect. He lacked the authority to make the call, and it is quite obviously being ignored by most suppliers. If it were actually enforced, I believe no companies that are contractors for the DoD could even host Anthropic- like GCP, Azure, and AWS. Perhaps they are currently figuring out how to get off all cloud provider govclouds, but I doubt it.
- gsibble 4mo agoMisdirection
- AustinDev 4mo agoThey could easily take the weights if they wanted. I don't believe they meaningfully lost access.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- wetpaws 4mo ago[dead]
- Onavo 4mo agoIf they use the defence production act, would Dario be even able to resign in protest?
- AustinDev 4mo agoIf they wanted to officially take the weights the DPA would work and Dario could do nothing. If they wanted to do it in clandestine manner no one could stop them and no one would know. It's very likely they already have all the weights from all the frontier models. I mean all the frontier models are capable of being served from AWS Bedrock so the weights aren't exactly locked in some air-gapped vault. It would be easy to make a national security justification to take the weights in a clandestine manner especially because Anthropic supposedly got caught giving China access to the model through a cutout.
- JackFr 4mo agoPretty sure even under DPA, taking without fair compensation would be a violation of the takings clause of 5th Amendment and wouldn't withstand legal scrutiny. If they wanted to get them clandestinely, yeah, they'd likely get away with it, but it is stealing.
- torstenvl 4mo agoTo be a taking, it would have to be property. Weights are almost certainly not property.
- swader999 4mo agoKind of crazy actually. Other models are catching up fast, they all can find the vulnerabilities in our (and by our I mean everyone's) underlying infra very fast. It takes a very long time to fix, review, and finally deploy these fixes. There really isn't much time left.
- ck2 4mo agothey are doing DOGE-cuts to all of intelligence now anyway dozens upon dozens fired for no reason so US "intelligence" is going to go even further backwards * https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/trump-acting-chief-national-intelligence-023742663.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/trump-acting-ch... November is going to be insanity
- parineum 4mo ago> dozens upon dozens fired for no reason When you say without reason do you mean without cause?
- islandfox100 4mo agoSeems to me OP's implication is that they were fired because someone wanted to hit a quota of (employees cut/payroll expenses reduced), or other similarly ''reasonless'' justifications.
- kansface 4mo agoHere is one sector of the US government I'm happy to see burned down. If the alternative is the status quo, I'm OK with any roll of the dice.
- tempodox 4mo agoIt can always get worse.
- eigenspace 4mo agoPah! Nonsense. What could possibly be worse than Weimar Germany or Tsarist Russia?
- baby_souffle 4mo agoSpeed running through that to 1984?
- micromacrofoot 4mo ago[flagged]
- tmaly 4mo agothere is a well known politician that uses this same trick
- medlazik 4mo agoAI marketing bullshit stunts are unlike anything I've seen in 30 years. It started with MS Copilot so called capabilities for work, which were completely made up use cases that didn't work at all (3 years later still). We've had OpenAI "AGI is coming" and "AI will take your job", now we have Mythos being so "dangerous" for cybersecurity, which of course makes the average Joe interpret it as Anthropic being "the better overall company, the NSA uses it!!". I mean gov foes with Anthropic are probably true, but the marketing is to blame not Mythos capabilities. This is all so fucking pathetic
- ToucanLoucan 4mo agoAll for a product that has yet to make a single honest dollar in profit for anyone who isn't nvidia. When this goes we might well see a recession. Not that anyone responsible will be worse off, of course.
- tempodox 4mo agoThe perpetrators all have their golden parachutes. The taxpayers will foot the bill.
- expedition32 4mo agoThe US is trillions in debt. We live in the age of magic- nobody foots the bill.
- scottyah 4mo agoWhy on earth would you expect any of them to take profit so early in the game?
- ToucanLoucan 4mo agoSilly me, expecting a company worth a trillion dollars to make... some money. Any money. A single profitable product.
- dofm 4mo agoIf Mythos is still running internally, the NSA still have some access to it. It's just crazy to believe there aren't CIA and/or NSA plants (tacitly acknowledged or otherwise) inside Anthropic and OpenAI. But Mythos is still only an advanced LLM so I am not sure what all this breathy fuss is about; it sounds like the PR war more than anything. If the NSA aren't themselves training technologies that are at least as powerful, that would modestly surprise me. Not that you need an LLM to monitor the risks to the USA. You just need Tulsi Gabbard's emails.
- SV_BubbleTime 4mo agoI think it’s beyond a mastery of PR. They literally called it Mythos and built a literal myth around it. I mean… maybe people just want the soap opera.
- ransom1538 4mo agoNSA has produced nothing. Does nothing. Why don't we just have them pick up garbage on the freeway to help out the tax payers? Let Anthropic and other adults push spying forward.
- ibejoeb 4mo agoThey're great at building datacenters and running massive archival operations.
- taftster 4mo agoHave we become reddit here? I mean, you probably have some sympathy and upvotes from fellow readers, but this isn't pushing the conversation forward at all. Any citations to your statement that NSA produces nothing? Or do you have a strong argument or evidence to support this?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- ransom1538 4mo agoI was expecting you to crush me with links of all their great works.. but nothing.
- taftster 4mo agoI mean, since we're doing reddit style, no need?
- speff 4mo agoGhidra comes to mind
- zb3 4mo agoGhidra is good, but would they release it if it was not for the leaks?
- teravor 4mo agomythos allowed mediocre people to get results by holding their hand through the process, or just ignoring their irrelevant input and knowing what to do. if you throw millions of tokens at IDA Pro MCP with the right prompt lets just say security by obscurity fails miserably because there is no obscurity when the LLM chews through the decompilation.
- baq 4mo agoIt isn’t bad, it isn’t good. It’s just how the world looks now. All software is open source now, some of it is just more open, some of it is less.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- robocat 4mo ago> law enforcement wasn’t able to keep up with those people Law enforcement is almost irrelevant to cause and effect. Enforcing laws between jurisdictions mostly requires military or heavy economic incentives.
- joe_mamba 4mo ago>mythos allowed mediocre people to get results by holding their hand through the process Isn't this what technology progress looks like? Industrial tools allowed mediocre people to improve their productivity by orders of magnitude which is how we managed(in the past) to build so many amazing things with less human toil and suffering than previous generations.
- imdsm 4mo agoProgress isn't always welcome by the incumbent who have built their moats on hoarding knowledge over being adaptable
- 4mo ago
- zb3 4mo ago> That contract has not been finalized, and some Pentagon officials want the N.S.A. to find a way to work with other models. Good, fsck NSA, that's the last organization I'd ever want to have access to Mythos. I hope this administration's incompetence will prevent them from regaining access for as long as possible
- baq 4mo agoIt’ll be the first organization to get access to Epic/Saga/Legend/Bible/Torah/Sutra/Vedan/whatever the Mythos+1 is called - and it might be the only one with this privilege
- Computer0 4mo agoThey will never be able to read all the words in my head that spell out exactly what I want to have happen at that org.
- bb88 4mo agoMore likely they'll convince congress they will need their own. Only it will 20-200 times more expensive and the US taxpayer will be paying for it but won't get access.
- axus 4mo agoThat would meet the OP's goal of NSA never getting a frontier model, "behind schedule" is the natural partner of "over budget".
- chasil 4mo ago'Mythos “broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours.”' Is Mythos a significant danger? The curl experience does not suggest that hysteria is warranted, but this gives me pause.
- maxall4 4mo agoOr, alternatively, it may suggest that the NSA’s classified systems are not very secure, which seems at least as possible: they may rely on requiring physical access to these systems to even attempt to penetrate them.
- enraged_camel 4mo ago>> The curl experience does not suggest that hysteria is warranted, but this gives me pause. What about the Firefox experience? Or are we conveniently ignoring things that don't confirm conclusions we've already reached?
- chasil 4mo agoI'm not as familiar with that. I do agree that it sounded substantial. I just think that a coreutils flaw is not as substantial as a rendering engine exploit.
- readthenotes1 4mo agoHadn't they spent a year hardening curl with various AI before they tried Mythos?
- fc417fc802 4mo agoYes. The original curl post didn't say anything like "mythos sucks" but rather "it's only a minor improvement in comparison to already widely used models".
- Chu4eeno 4mo agoYes, and Firefox had not. Which I think points at Mythos not being some big jump in capability finding things earlier LLMs didn't, it seems to mostly come down to massively increased compute budget and they finally catching up in context sizes.
- gaiagraphia 4mo agoIs there a historical precedent as to what happened when the upstart denied capability to the empire? The closest I can think of is the bronze age collapse.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- sawjet 4mo agoThere is no consensus on what caused the bronze age collapse.
- gaiagraphia 4mo agoThenn, it makes it more riveting when modern day phenonema happen, surely? Unless you subscribe to a historical channel?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- gaiagraphia 4mo agoSorry i forgot to ask. What are the top 5 theories, and do you see any modern parallels?
- wil421 4mo agoAre you an AI?
- gaiagraphia 4mo agoTry not to be. Apoologies if the link aint obvious enough.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- SadErn 4mo ago[dead]
- sometimelurker 4mo agoI really seriously doubt this. no proof, obviously, but this sounds too unbelievable. the NSA probably has the mythos pretrain and might be finetuning it themselves.
- jawiggins 4mo ago> The White House and intelligence officials had pushed forward a classified contract between Anthropic and the N.S.A., which would allow the spy agency to use the company’s technology for a variety of purposes, including intelligence analysis and detecting new computer vulnerabilities. Ironic that both sides are playing a horse shoe game: Gov: The model is both a supply chain risk and also we'll DPA you if you don't give it to us. Anthropic: The model is both like a nuclear weapon in terms of national security implications and safe for general release.
- anshumankmr 4mo agoI mean graphite control rods do exist in nuclear reactors to absorb excess neutrons, preventing the fuel from going critical & making it technically safe for general use (THOUGH of course disasters have happened)
- Woodi 4mo ago> NSA lost access to Mythos That's is funniest thing I read since long time :)) I mean: it's so absurd, almost like things we had in real socialism in 80s :> But, yeah, freedom have consequences.
- beyondscaletech 4mo ago[flagged]
- sometimelurker 4mo agohonest question: does the nsa have the abilty to take the model weights from anthropic? also, as I understand it anthropic employees from the USA have mythos access, and I dont see why this shouldnt extend to the nsa. this seems pretty silly and kinda unbelievable. commenting again to add more infomaiton to my opinion and ask that you don't just blindly downvote bc I don't believe the nsa doesn't have mythos
- smithdamian 4mo ago[flagged]