Japan’s PM orders cybersecurity review to stop Mythos going full CyberZilla

Security

Fears exponential increase in attack scale and speed

Japan’s prime minister Sanae Takaichi has ordered a review of government cybersecurity strategy, citing the arrival of Anthropic’s bug-hunting model Mythos as a moment that makes it necessary to order a cabinet-level project.

In a Tuesday cabinet meeting, the PM instructed cybersecurity minister Hisashi Matsumoto to devise measures to check the state of government systems to determine whether it’s possible to detect and fix vulnerabilities, and to develop a plan to ensure critical infrastructure operators can do likewise.

Japan’s leader ordered the checks because she feels Mythos and similar frontier models may be misused, and that attacks on infrastructure may therefore increase in speed and scale – perhaps even exponentially.

Over the last couple of years cybersecurity vendors and researchers have often pointed out that AI models make it possible to find flaws and automate attacks.

When Anthropic debuted Mythos in early April, the notion that AI has the potential to vastly complicate the security landscape went mainstream.

Many regulators around the world have issued guidance to point out that now is the perfect time to revisit and improve security strategies and capabilities, because Mythos and other AI models mean defenses are going to be tested like never before.

India’s securities regulator went a step further by ordering a security review at the organizations it oversees.

And now Japan’s leader has decided the matter is of sufficient importance that her office needs to weigh in and set new policy to ensure AI doesn’t go on a destructive rampage through Japanese infrastructure.

Whether Takaichi’s urgency is needed is open to debate. Some researchers have said that while Mythos can find bugs at speed, but doesn’t find flaws humans can’t detect with their naked brains. Others suggest Mythos is not vastly better at finding bugs than open source models that pre-date it and are publicly available – unlike Mythos which is restricted to certain users.

Others have all but dismissed Mythos as a marketing stunt. ®

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