OUT OF BAND | The Breaking Point: Inside Mythos' Zero-Day Machine with Anthropic's Nicholas Carlini

Nicole Perlroth sits down with Nicholas Carlini for an Out of Band conversation on the imminent zero-day surge. Carlini explains what Mythos can already do: find and exploit flaws in some of the world’s most hardened, widely deployed software—with minimal human input. He details what Mythos has already hacked, which now includes most of the operating systems in use. Together, they unpack what happens when these elite capabilities are no longer confined to intelligence agencies and freelance hackers—when AI collapses the barrier to entry and begins to overwhelm bug bounty programs. Perlroth presses Carlini on Anthropic’s decision to hold Mythos back, and reports that unauthorized users may have already accessed it. She also asks the uncomfortable question: will researchers like him, that get advance access to these models, become prime targets for nation-state hackers? Finally, they confront the bigger question: whether defenders have any credible path to regain the advantage in a world where, with enough compute, almost anything can be hacked.