[ExI] Holy cow!

John Clark johnkclark at gmail.com
Wed Apr 8 20:53:50 UTC 2026


On Wed, Apr 8, 2026 at 10:46 AM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

*> It'll be the bombs.  Almost no one will remember yet another incremental
> step in AI improvement,*


*Wars are a tragedy but unfortunately, as any student of history can tell
you, are also a dime a dozen, however this is fundamentally new.** Anthropic's
new AI not only found **thousands of high-severity and zero-day
vulnerabilities** , within hours of its discovery it also found practical
ways to exploit them. For example, Claude Mythos found a bug that had been
in** OpenBSD**, an open-source operating system that was specifically
designed to be difficult to hack, for 27 years but nobody had noticed it
before. However Mythos found it and found a way to use it to take control
of any computer that used OpenBSD. And Apple's **macOS** uses it, and so
does **Windows 10**, and **Android**, and many **Internet routers**.*

*And Mythos found a 16 year old bug in FFmpeg that would  enable it to
control any computer that uses that, and YouTube does, as do many if not
most tools that process video or audio. Mythos even found a devastating bug
in the Linux Kernel that would enable a standard user to gain full
privileged access that only the system administrator is supposed to
have. It found zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and
every major web browser.*

*For the very first time a vast non-human intelligence has the power to
devastate the world's economy and plunge civilization into chaos. And you
say it's just hype,  nothing special, just an incremental improvement! *

* John K Clark*







plications of the war with Iran, and I am sure I will again soon. But I
> want to interrupt that thought to highlight a stunning advance in
> artificial intelligence — one that arrived sooner than expected and that
> will have equally profound geopolitical implications." [...]
> >
> > "Holy cow! Superintelligent A.I. is arriving faster than anticipated, at
> least in this area. We knew it was getting amazingly good at enabling
> anyone, no matter how computer literate, to write software code. But even
> Anthropic reportedly did not anticipate that it would get this good, this
> fast, at finding ways to find and exploit flaws in existing code. Anthropic
> said it found critical exposures in every major operating system and Web
> browser, many of which run power grids, waterworks, airline reservation
> systems, retailing networks, military systems and hospitals all over the
> world." [...]
> >
> > " I’m really not being hyperbolic when I say that kids could deploy this
> by accident. Mom and Dad, get ready for:
> > "Honey, what did you do after school today?”
> > “Well, Mom, my friends and I took down the power grid. What’s for
> dinner?”
> > That is why Anthropic is giving carefully controlled versions to key
> software providers so they can find and fix the vulnerabilities before the
> bad guys do — or your kids." [...]
> >
> > "It will be interesting to see what history remembers most about April
> 7, 2026 — the postponed U.S. release of bombs over Iran or the carefully
> controlled release of the Claude Mythos Preview by Anthropic and its
> technical allies."
> > ==
> >
> >
>
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