I find it pretty funny that China would even attempt, given how loud Anthropic has been against them. Mythos is only available to participants of Project Glasswing, which only has 40 companies and the U.S. Government in it at the moment. Even if we take Mythos's ability at half face value, the model is still significantly more powerful than anything currently out there. Even OpenAI's GPT 5.5 is known to be capable of discovering high-complexity real-world vulnerabilities.

This is where the significant gap is between the U.S. and Chinese models, as they have not yet reached the capability of discovery of low-complexity real-world vulnerabilities, with Kimi K2.5 being considered their top model. This isn't something that is just U.S. or Western analysts saying is something China is concerned about, as China's own analysts have highlighted and come out over this massive gap that has emerged.

China's way of catching up to the U.S. has relied on releasing open-source models where users have access to the model weights. This just flat out cannot be allowed to happen currently with models like Mythos and GPT 5.5 due to the chaos it would unleash on the entire world.

Still, Chinese analysts have expressed concern over the potential of the new Anthropic model. One organization, IDC China, said that Mythos posed a significant risk to Chinese companies, and that Anthropic’s limits on its reach created a technology gap. Another analyst, highlighting the cybersecurity threat, wrote that China was sharpening swords while the other side rolled out a Gatling gun.

Chinese analysts have been particularly worried because they view Anthropic as hostile to China. The start-up is currently embroiled in suits with the Pentagon, which announced it would be removed from American government networks after a dispute over how the technology would be used.

But since its founding, Anthropic has geared its business toward U.S. national security customers. It was the first to put its A.I. models on classified American networks, for example, and has long taken pains to keep its technology out of the hands of the Chinese. In September, Anthropic expanded restrictions on its technology to include companies whose ownership structures made them vulnerable to control “from jurisdictions where our products are not permitted, like China, regardless of where they operate.”