Federal officials on May 14 said Anthropic’s Claude Mythos tool marks a turning point for government cybersecurity and military operations, warning that advanced AI models will require stronger public-private partnerships to defend against emerging risks.
Speaking at Rubrik’s Federal Cyber Resilience Breakfast in Washington, D.C., officials from the White House and Department of Defense (DOD) said frontier AI models are changing the cyber threat landscape rapidly. Mythos, for example, has powerful, native hacking capabilities.
“It’s a watershed moment for all of us,” said Paul Lyons, principal deputy assistant secretary for cyber policy at DOD, which the Trump administration has rebranded to the Department of War.
“This is fundamentally going to change warfare as we know it today,” Lyons added. “This is not evolutionary warfare. This is revolutionary warfare.”
Today, Lyons said that the United States holds a strategic advantage because American companies are leading the development of frontier AI capabilities.
At the same time, administration officials emphasized that foreign adversaries are likely to gain access to similar capabilities.
“We are really figuring still out what the full implications of these advanced AI frontier models are,” said Nick Polk, branch director for federal cybersecurity at the White House Office of Management and Budget. He warned that adversaries could eventually use similar models “in a way that could be malicious or adversarial.”
Polk said agencies must continue focusing on foundational cyber defenses because attackers still need network access before exploiting vulnerabilities.
“The first thing you have to do is get into the network,” Polk said. “That’s really where strong identity still is really critical.”
He added that Federal Chief Information Officer Greg Barbaccia is prioritizing efforts to move frontier AI models through the FedRAMP authorization process more quickly so agencies can begin integrating and testing them for mission use cases.
Travis Rosiek, public sector chief technology officer at Rubrik, cautioned that frontier AI capabilities such as Mythos will dramatically expand the pool of capable cyberattackers.
“This makes any citizen in the world who has access to the internet and AI super successful – to have nation-state capable tools with no training,” Rosiek said. “So, I call it the end of the compliance era, because you can be compliant, fully patched, and it’s not going to make a difference.”
“We’re definitely way behind the ball game here,” he added. “Organizations really need to be more proactive in building these recovery [and] resilience capabilities before it’s too late.”
Stronger partnerships are necessary
Officials also stressed that the government will need deeper collaboration with industry as AI capabilities evolve.
Lorrie King, deputy chief of staff in the White House Office of the National Cyber Director, said the administration is working with industry AI labs to rapidly scale “the best and most secure technologies while also advancing innovation.”
“Close partnership with America’s companies, whose capabilities, ingenuity, and insight often outpace governments, is necessary for our success,” King said. “We are therefore committed to a new level of open and proactive collaboration with the private sector to accelerate policy solutions, share actionable information, and build strong partnerships that actually work.”
Lyons echoed that message, saying that the traditional line of separation between government and industry operations “is going to blur as we move forward.”
“We need a teaming approach, in many ways, to get after this problem, but to leverage it as an opportunity,” Lyons said.
Lyons said he’s working closely with Katherine Sutton, the assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy, to ensure the Pentagon is “asking the right questions.”
“How do you capture that relationship [with industry] in new ways that leverage that capability across the cyber spectrum of operations? And that could be offshoring some capability to the private sector to do parts of our mission, but there will be inherent governmental activities that must be done by a warfighter,” Lyons explained. “What does that look like? So, we’re working our way through that.”