The Anthropic writeup addresses this explicitly:

> This was the most critical vulnerability we discovered in OpenBSD with Mythos Preview after a thousand runs through our scaffold. Across a thousand runs through our scaffold, the total cost was under $20,000 and found several dozen more findings. While the specific run that found the bug above cost under $50, that number only makes sense with full hindsight. Like any search process, we can't know in advance which run will succeed.

Mythos scoured the entire continent for gold and found some. For these small models, the authors pointed at a particular acre of land and said "any gold there? eh? eh?" while waggling their eyebrows suggestively.

For a true apples-to-apples comparison, let's see it sweep the entire FreeBSD codebase. I hypothesize it will find the exploit, but it will also turn up so much irrelevant nonsense that it won't matter.

Wasn't the scaffolding for the Mythos run basically a line of bash that loops through every file of the codebase and prompts the model to find vulnerabilities in it? That sounds pretty close to "any gold there?" to me, only automated.

Have Anthropic actually said anything about the amount of false positives Mythos turned up?

FWIW, I saw some talk on Xitter (so grain of salt) about people replicating their result with other (public) SotA models, but each turned up only a subset of the ones Mythos found. I'd say that sounds plausible from the perspective of Mythos being an incremental (though an unusually large increment perhaps) improvement over previous models, but one that also brings with it a correspondingly significant increase in complexity.

So the angle they choose to use for presenting it and the subsequent buzz is at least part hype -- saying "it's too powerful to release publicly" sounds a lot cooler than "it costs $20000 to run over your codebase, so we're going to offer this directly to enterprise customers (and a few token open source projects for marketing)". Keep in mind that the examples in Nicholas Carlini's presentation were using Opus, so security is clearly something they've been working on for a while (as they should, because it's a huge risk). They didn't just suddenly find themselves having accidentally created a super hacker.

> Wasn't the scaffolding for the Mythos run basically a line of bash that loops through every file of the codebase and prompts the model to find vulnerabilities in it? That sounds pretty close to "any gold there?" to me, only automated.

But the entire value is that it can be automated. If you try to automate a small model to look for vulnerabilities over 10,000 files, it's going to say there are 9,500 vulns. Or none. Both are worthless without human intervention.

I definitely breathed a sigh of relief when I read it was $20,000 to find these vulnerabilities with Mythos. But I also don't think it's hype. $20,000 is, optimistically, a tenth the price of a security researcher, and that shift does change the calculus of how we should think about security vulnerabilities.

> But the entire value is that it can be automated. If you try to automate a small model to look for vulnerabilities over 10,000 files, it's going to say there are 9,500 vulns. Or none.

'Or none' is ruled out since it found the same vulnerability - I agree that there is a question on precision on the smaller model, but barring further analysis it just feels like '9500' is pure vibes from yourself? Also (out of interest) did Anthropic post their false-positive rate?

The smaller model is clearly the more automatable one IMO if it has comparable precision, since it's just so much cheaper - you could even run it multiple times for consensus.