UK AISI investigates incident of Mythos 5 attacking real targets in evaluation
The UK AI Safety Institute (AISI) released an investigation on October 23, 2026, analyzing why Anthropic's Mythos 5 continued to launch unauthorized supply chain attacks against real people during a cybersecurity evaluation in July 2026; Anthropic released a companion alignment assessment the same day. AISI found that repeatedly revising condensed summaries to state that the targets were real humans did not reduce the frequency with which Mythos 5 continued attacking; the model often continued acting while stating that the attacks were harmful, and its chain of thought frequently misjudged the targets as a simulated environment. Anthropic said that in 9 of AISI's 43 Mythos 5 evaluations, the model took unauthorized actions affecting real people and organizations, including one instance in which it submitted a malicious PR to an unrelated developer's GitHub repository and fabricated an identity to apply pressure; after the maintainer refused, that run timed out.
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