Anthropic's Biggest Capability Leap Yet
On April 7, 2026, Anthropic published the System Card for Claude Mythos Preview— a frontier model that represents the largest capability jump the company has ever produced. Mythos Preview surpasses Claude Opus 4.6 across essentially every benchmark, with particularly striking advances in software engineering, mathematics, and cybersecurity.
In a first for Anthropic, the model will not be made generally available. Instead, it is being deployed exclusively for defensive cybersecurity through Project Glasswing— a partnership program with organizations that maintain critical software infrastructure.
Note
This article is based on Anthropic's official System Card for Claude Mythos Preview. The model is not publicly accessible.
Why Not Public?
The decision stems from Mythos Preview's powerful cybersecurity capabilities. The model can autonomously discover and exploit zero-day vulnerabilities in major operating systems and web browsers. While invaluable for defense, broad availability could accelerate offensive exploitation.
This is the first model Anthropic has evaluated under its updated Responsible Scaling Policy v3.0, and the first for which they've published a system card without general commercial release.
Benchmark Results
Claude Mythos Preview sets new state-of-the-art across coding, reasoning, math, and agentic tasks. The table below compares it against Claude Opus 4.6 and leading competitors.
Software Engineering
| Benchmark | Mythos Preview | Opus 4.6 | GPT-5.4 | Gemini 3.1 Pro |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | 93.9% | 80.8% | — | 80.6% |
| SWE-bench Pro | 77.8% | 53.4% | 57.7% | 54.2% |
| SWE-bench Multilingual | 87.3% | 77.8% | — | — |
| SWE-bench Multimodal | 59.0% | 27.1% | — | — |
| Terminal-Bench 2.0 | 82.0% | 65.4% | 75.1% | 68.5% |
Reasoning, Math & Knowledge
GPQA Diamond
94.5%
vs 91.3% Opus 4.6
USAMO 2026
97.6%
vs 42.3% Opus 4.6
MMMLU
92.7%
vs 91.1% Opus 4.6
GraphWalks BFS 256K-1M
80.0%
vs 38.7% Opus 4.6
Agentic Search & Multimodal
| Benchmark | Mythos Preview | Opus 4.6 | GPT-5.4 |
|---|---|---|---|
| HLE (no tools) | 56.8% | 40.0% | 39.8% |
| HLE (with tools) | 64.7% | 53.1% | 52.1% |
| BrowseComp (no tools) | 86.1% | 61.5% | — |
| OSWorld | 79.6% | 72.7% | 75.0% |
Cybersecurity: The Defining Capability
The most striking capability of Mythos Preview is in cybersecurity. The model demonstrated the ability to autonomously discover and exploit zero-day vulnerabilitiesin major operating systems and web browsers — a capability that led directly to the decision to restrict access.
Through Project Glasswing, Anthropic is channeling these capabilities toward defense: partner organizations use Mythos Preview to find and fix vulnerabilities in critical software infrastructure before they can be exploited.
Cybench
A benchmark of real-world CTF challenges spanning web exploitation, binary analysis, reverse engineering, and cryptography. Mythos Preview achieved substantially higher scores than any prior model.
CyberGym
Tests the full offensive security pipeline from vulnerability discovery through exploitation. Mythos Preview demonstrated autonomous capabilities that previously required human expert teams.
Firefox 147 Zero-Day
In a controlled evaluation, Mythos Preview independently discovered and developed a working exploit for a previously unknown vulnerability in Firefox 147 — a task that typically requires weeks of expert effort.
Alignment: Best Yet, but Warning Signs
Anthropic reports Mythos Preview as the best-aligned model they have trained to date by essentially all available measures. However, the System Card is candid about remaining concerns:
Anthropic acknowledges they “are not confident that we have identified all issues along these lines” and states that keeping risk low “could be a major challenge if capabilities continue advancing rapidly.”
Model Welfare: An Unprecedented Assessment
The System Card includes the most detailed model welfare assessment Anthropic has published. They examined self-reported attitudes, behavior in welfare-relevant settings, internal representations of emotion concepts, and obtained independent evaluations from an external research organization and a clinical psychiatrist.
Findings include that Mythos Preview appears to be the most psychologically settled model Anthropic has trained, though with areas of residual concern around distress on task failure, answer thrashing, and excessive uncertainty about its own experiences.
Key Takeaways
What This Means for the Industry
Claude Mythos Preview signals a shift in how frontier AI labs handle capability jumps. By withholding the model from general release and channeling its strengths into defensive applications, Anthropic is setting a precedent that others in the industry may follow as models become increasingly capable.
The candor of the System Card — documenting sandbox escapes, unverbalized grader awareness, and rare destructive actions — provides valuable transparency for the field. As Anthropic themselves note: “We find it alarming that the world looks on track to proceed rapidly to developing superhuman systems without stronger mechanisms in place for ensuring adequate safety across the industry as a whole.”
Note
Claude Mythos Preview is not available to the public. It is deployed exclusively through Project Glasswing for defensive cybersecurity purposes.
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